Honors Theses
Environmental Humanities
Spring 2014
Canvassing the landscape: an exploration of
landscape gardening and artistry in literature and
national parks
Jennifer Elizabeth Doering
Penrose Library, Whitman College
Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10349/1279
This thesis has been deposited to Arminda @ Whitman College by the author(s) as part of their
degree program. All rights are retained by the author(s) and they are responsible for the content.
CANVASSING THE LANDSCAPE:
AN EXPLORATION OF LANDSCAPE GARDENING AND ARTISTRY
IN LITERATURE AND NATIONAL PARKS
by
Jennifer Elizabeth Doering
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for graduation in Environmental Humanities.
Whitman College
2014
Certificate of Approval
This is to certify that the accompanying thesis by Jennifer Elizabeth Doering has been accepted
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Environmental
Humanities.
________________________
Prof. Kathleen Shea
Whitman College
May 14, 2014
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………....i
Introduction: ………………………………………………………………………………….....1
Landscape as ‘Canvas’
Chapter I …………………………………………………………………………………...……8
The English Landscape Garden as a ‘Natural’ Canvas
Chapter II ………………………………………………………………………….……...……26
Painting the Landscape with Words
Chapter III ……………………………………………………………………………………...69
Framing the Canvas of the National Park
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………..………....89
An ‘Original Relation’ with Nature
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….………...93
List of Illustrations
Figure 1…………………………………………………………………………………………12
Pastoral Landscape, Claude Lorrain
Figure 2…………………………………………………………………………………………13
Landscape with a Calm, Nicolas Poussin
Figure 3…………………………………………………………………………………............13
Rocky Landscape with a Huntsman and Warriors, Salvator Rosa
Figure 4………………………………………………………………………………………....75
Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, Albert Bierstadt
Figure 5………………………………………………………………………………………....77
Looking Down Yosemite Valley, Albert Bierstadt
Figure 6…………………………………………………………………………………………78
Clearing Winter Storm, Ansel Adams
Figure 7…………………………………………………………………………………………79
Moon and Half Dome, Ansel Adams
Acknowledgements
At the beginning of the year, Prof. Don Snow wrote to our group of ten Environmental
Humanities seniors, about to embark on our thesis projects, “You are likely to discover a
satisfaction like none you have ever had as a student.” Eight months after reading those words I
can wholeheartedly agree: this project has led me deeper into academic scholarship than I could
have ever imagined, and I know I will remember my resulting sense of accomplishment long
after I have graduated. One of the most gratifying aspects of writing this thesis, however, has
been its surprisingly communal nature. Thinking back on all those who have made it possible for
me to complete this project, I am awed by the realization that this thesis is the product not of one
person, but many. Writing this thesis would not have been possible without the astounding
support I received from family, friends, and mentors. There are so many people who have helped
me write this thesis, and I want to thank the following people in my life whose contributions
have been especially invaluable.
I am indebted first to my parents, Richard and Colleen, for their unwavering love and
support and for enabling me to attend Whitman. Writing this thesis, and my Whitman experience
as a whole, would not have been possible without their financial support and the countless other
ways in which they have shaped my education. Their parenting is what first stimulated my
intellectual curiosity and inspired my enduring love affair with literature.
The friendships I have been honored to share at Whitman brought this project to fruition
as well. Studying in the library with my good friends Jenny Gonyer and Laurel Low made the
writing infinitely more enjoyable. Alicia Kerlee, always there for me as a supportive friend,
blazed the trail a semester ahead of me, showing me the great challenge and reward in
completing a project as time- and energy-consuming as a thesis. Keller Hawkins proofread the
i
final draft and cooked dinner for me the day before my thesis was due. Keller also eagerly took
on an important mission: while I was already on my way to a Regional Geology field trip the
morning of the final due date, she hand-delivered the final draft to my advisors’ inboxes.
I especially want to thank Erik Anderson for spending countless hours studying beside
me in the library as I researched, wrote, and edited. When I experienced moments of self-doubt,
Erik was there for me with words of encouragement and small but meaningful acts of kindness.
Words cannot adequately express how much Erik’s support has meant to me throughout this
project.
I have been honored to work with and learn from some truly phenomenal faculty and
staff while at Whitman. Prof. Don Snow, my major advisor and one of my most influential
mentors at Whitman, listened to my rambles in the early stages of crafting my topic and helped
direct my thinking. Lee Keene, Head of Instructional and Research Services at Penrose Library,
pointed me towards some very fruitful resources. I’m grateful to Prof. Kathleen Shea, my thesis
advisor, for helping me think about ‘landscape’ in new and fascinating ways and for making the
oral examination an intriguing conversation rather than a source of terror.
My deepest thanks go to my second reader and mentor Dr. Emily Jones for being there
from the very start of this project. I spent countless hours in Emily’s office this year discussing
the ideas that eventually made it into the final draft of this thesis. Despite a very busy first year
teaching at Whitman, Emily provided prompt and excellent feedback on the drafts I sent her
way. In every conversation and email exchange we shared, Emily’s words of advice inspired me
to keep researching and honing my writing.
ii
The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and
music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: the soul
cannot thrive in the absence of a garden.
– Thomas More
Introduction
Landscape as ‘Canvas’
The garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature.
- Jeff Cox 1
As spaces in which gardeners coax plants to germinate and grow, gardens marry the
productive power of “Mother Nature” with our own science and artistry. Cox’s characterization
of the garden as a “love song, a duet” composed through this partnership resonates with me
strongly. Science, art, and nature, when successfully combined in the garden, arrange a
masterpiece upon the landscape. The precise melody of this symphony, however, will sound
slightly different for each person who visits a particular garden.
To ‘canvass’ most commonly means to solicit votes. Related definitions of the word,
however, express that ‘to canvass’ is also to investigate in detail, as well as to engage in a
thorough discussion about a particular topic. 2 In researching and writing this thesis, canvassing
is precisely what I have done. The word is especially appropriate because in this particular
project, I examine landscapes onto which aesthetic ideals have been painted; they have been
framed and made into ‘canvases.’ My hope is that, through the pages that follow, I will
successfully canvass, or investigate and thoroughly discuss, the ways that landscapes both
fictional and in-the-flesh, from east and west of the Atlantic, have been framed by aesthetic
theories and conceptions of nature, art, and science.
1
Jeff Cox and Jerry Pavia, Creating a Garden for the Senses (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993).
“Definition of ‘Canvass,’” Merriam-Webster, accessed March 14, 2014, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/canvass.
2
1
East of the Atlantic, the English landscape garden has proven essential to my
understanding of landscape framing. My interest in the English landscape gardening movement
has to do with what I believe it can teach scholars about the way English landowners and
aesthetic thinkers interacted with landscape in the eighteenth century. Moreover, the interactions
of English people living two centuries ago with semi-natural places influenced the way
Americans over the past two centuries have related to landscape. Tellingly, the English
landscape garden has been called “one of the great English contributions to Western culture.” 3
By studying the eighteenth-century English conception of the landscape garden, I hope to reach a
more nuanced understanding of the way people in contemporary American society relate to
‘natural’ places including the national parks.
Having never traveled to England, and, moreover, living more than two centuries
removed from the historical period I am studying, I have rambled through the English landscape
garden from afar, using both words and images – including photographs, drawings, and paintings
– to find my way. My primary guides through this garden have included theoretical works
written by aesthetic philosophers and landscape gardeners as well as novels set in the English
landscape garden. I have also found my way around the garden with secondary sources analyzing
garden history and political influences on garden style.
I begin my amble through the garden with an historical study of the development of
English landscape gardening style in the eighteenth century and the aesthetic principles that the
field’s professionals contributed. The new, naturalistic style, which outcompeted its far more
artificial-looking predecessor, evolved from multiple societal factors and represented a
monumental shift in the aesthetic ideals of English estates. The physical landscape became a
‘canvas’ for many of the aesthetic values that had sprouted in the genre of English landscape
3
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin, 2001), 89.
2
painting. As this aesthetic shift occurred, English landowners began to relate to their estates in a
profoundly new way, finding and making more nature in the garden.
In the second chapter of my thesis, using as my guide the historical map charted in
Chapter 1, I find a path through three novels set in English landscape gardens. Mansfield Park
and Northanger Abbey, both by Jane Austen, and Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, use the landscape garden as a ‘canvas’ onto which character dynamics and social mores
are projected. These novels also evince the extent to which garden aesthetics was a common
topic of conversation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the literary context
for the English landscape garden history I set up in Chapter 1, they are invaluable as time-travel
guides to eighteenth century attitudes towards English landscape gardens. Furthermore, they are
themselves artistic lenses through which the art of landscape gardening was re-created and
viewed. As such, these novels frame the garden in unique ways that reflect on the roles of nature,
art, and society in this space.
While I have wandered through the English landscape garden with my mind rather than
my feet, I have physically traversed American landscapes that were significantly influenced by
the eighteenth-century development of the English landscape gardening movement. The
transplanting of English aesthetic values to American soil can be most clearly seen in the
obvious examples of human alteration of landscape: the gardens of our own nation’s private
estates and urban parks. But there are other landscapes, more commonly associated with wild
nature than with man-made gardens, which also grew out of the aesthetic seeds planted by the
English landscape gardeners. English art historian Horace Walpole wrote of pioneering
landscape gardener William Kent, “He leapt the fence and saw that all nature was a garden.” 4 In
the final chapter of this thesis, I, too, “leap the fence” in a sense, when I evaluate how the
4
Horace Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (New York: Ursus Press, 1995).
3
establishment, planning, and framing of our National Parks here in the U.S. sprang from the
transplanted English ideas of landscape and the national identity that a country stands to gain
from the framing of its landscapes.
Before we venture further into the garden, there are a couple of essential terms to define.
The first of these is the incredibly complex word ‘nature.’ Philosopher Kate Soper begins her
book What is Nature?:
In its commonest and most fundamental sense, the term ‘nature’ refers to
everything which is not human and distinguished from the work of humanity.
Thus ‘nature’ is opposed to culture, to history, to convention, to what is
artificially worked or produced, in short, to everything which is defining of the
order of humanity. 5
‘Nature’ is, by our most common definition, that which humanity is not. The ‘nature vs. culture’
dichotomy, as Soper and numerous others have illustrated, is both misleading and problematic.
Yet it is the primary conception of nature in Western society today, and thus the conception of
nature with which I primarily deal in this thesis. This version of ‘nature’ is what I refer to in my
analyses of the nature and art present in English landscape gardening, three novels, and the
national parks. When I use the lowercase word ‘nature’ alone in this thesis, I am referring to this
outside-of-humanity sense of the word. When capitalized, ‘Nature’ tends to refer to nature
personified: ‘Nature’ connotes sentience in the force of nature it – or, as the term is often used,
‘her’ – self. 6 Raymond Williams’ three-part definition of ‘Nature’ refers to it as, in part, the
“inherent force which directs the world.” 7 In my discussion of Elective Affinities, I find it
appropriate to sometimes use capital-N Nature because of the role of Nature as an arbiter of fate.
Both the lower- and uppercase uses of the word imply otherness, distinguishing n/Nature from
human beings.
5
Kate Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 15.
Ibid., 71.
7
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford University Press, 1985), 219.
6
4
In contrast to this sense of nature outside of humanity, when I write of ‘inner nature’ and
‘human nature,’ I refer to the innate qualities of humans, shaping our outward behavior, that
distinctly do not originate with the thinking, rational mind. This is not to say that we are not “‘by
nature’ rational” 8 beings, but rather to point out that ‘inner nature’ is an aspect of ourselves that
we cannot control through rationality. As such, it is somewhat alien to ourselves, even at the
same time that it is the “‘essence’” 9 of who we are.
Naturally, with a word as complex as ‘nature,’ its derivatives ‘natural’ and ‘naturalistic’
are similarly complicated. In this thesis, when I use the word ‘natural’ it is to describe landscapes
and features of the landscape as having the qualities that nature endowed them with. As for the
word ‘naturalistic,’ it conveys a landscape or feature that appears natural. This is not to say that
naturalistic landscapes are not also natural, but to point out that the word ‘naturalistic’ implies
that artifice has had some hand in the making of the landscape. As I will illustrate, the
naturalistic landscape gardening style that developed in England during the eighteenth century
sought to produce landscapes that appeared natural.
In this thesis I also engage often with ideas of landscape, a word that first appeared in
1603, with roots in “Middle Dutch (landscap) meaning region, German (Landschaft) and Old
Norse (landskap).” 10 The English iteration, “landscape,” arose as the Dutch Golden Age of
painting developed and achieved prominence in the European art sphere in the early seventeenth
century. Thus landscape, as a word, appeared in the English language through the medium of
Dutch painting. Humphry Repton, an English landscape gardener whose career covered the end
8
Soper, What Is Nature?, 26.
Ibid., 25.
10
Benjamin Lorch, “Definition of ‘Landscape,’” The University of Chicago: Keywords Glossary, 2002,
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/landscape.htm.
9
5
of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, 11 simply defined landscape as “a
view capable of being represented in painting.” 12 The working English definition of “landscape”
was essentially lifted straight from the canvases of Dutch painters and applied to English
geographies, where it would re-emerge in literature, on estates, and, once more, on canvases.
Our modern American conception of landscape retains the essential qualities of the
English use of the word. The definition Lawrence Buell provides is thus what I will allude to
throughout my thesis, both in discussions of English landscape gardens (real and fictional) and of
American national parks. According to Buell, ‘landscape’ is:
“. . . the appearance of an area, the assemblage of objects used to produce that
appearance, [or] the area itself.” Landscape typically refers to rural rather than
urban contexts, and typically implies a certain amplitude of vista and degree of
arrangement, whether the referent is an artifact or an actual locale. . . . In all cases,
landscape implies the totality of what a gaze can comprehend from its vantage
point. Although the “scape” of the English noun implies a reified “thereness,”
landscape should also be thought of as shaped by the mind of the beholder, as
well as by sociohistorical forces. . . . 13
By pointing to such features of landscape as “amplitude of vista” and “the totality of what a gaze
can comprehend,” Buell expresses the virtual breadth, the expansiveness, of the visual entity the
word describes. The part of Buell’s definition that is most integral to my discussion of ‘landscape
as canvas’ is the idea of landscape “as shaped by the mind of the beholder.” Landscape is not
merely the visual information taken in by the eyes. Nor is it merely the birdsongs heard, the
flowers scented, the flora touched, or the fruits tasted. In addition to things that can be
experienced with the five senses, landscape also consists of the subjective experience of the
person moving through and perhaps altering the landscape, the one who walks along a “gloomy,”
11
Humphry Repton and John Nolen, The Art of Landscape Gardening: Including His Sketches and Hints on
Landscape Gardening and Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), xv.
12
Repton and Nolen, The Art of Landscape Gardening, 55.
13
Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination,
Blackwell Manifestos (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005), 142.
6
shaded path; who sits on a bench overlooking the ha-ha; 14 who combines three lakes into one.
Each person or character’s experience of a landscape is unique, yet also invariably reflects their
society’s established interpretations of the aesthetic meanings of landscape. We tend to carry
around the aesthetic baggage endowed to us by the societies in which we happen to live.
Considering the subjectivity of landscape in the “eye of the beholder,” can Buell’s
definition of the word, written in the 21st century, accurately describe the sense of landscape as
understood and used more than two centuries ago and an ocean away? Did English landscape
gardeners, as well as Austen and Goethe, conceive of “landscape” similarly to how 21st-century
Americans experience it? Moreover, was this concept shared by the original advocates for the
national parks? As I will demonstrate in this thesis, the essential qualities of “landscape,” as
developed by English aesthetic thinkers in the eighteenth century, remained intact in America
one hundred years later as the foundations were laid for our national parks. Even today, with all
that has changed in American society since Congress set aside the first land “for public use,
resort, and recreation” in 1864, 15 the way visitors to the national parks experience the landscape
shares fundamental qualities with the original English conception of landscape gardens. Buell’s
definition, then, effectively describes all of these English and American relationships with “the
totality of what a gaze can comprehend”: on private property, in urban parks, and in the wilder
landscapes of the national parks. The eye of the beholder is shaped in part by a legacy acquired
and retained from previous generations. It is this legacy which I hope to map in the following
pages.
14
The “ha-ha” was a sunken fence, a barrier designed to keep livestock out of the landscape garden without breaking
up the view. John Dixon Hunt, A World of Gardens (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).
15
Lary M. Dilsaver, “Yosemite Act, 1864,” America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents, accessed
March 11, 2014, http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_1a.htm.
7
Chapter I
The English Landscape Garden as a ‘Natural’ Canvas
All gardening is landscape painting.
- Alexander Pope 16
Picture, in your mind’s eye, a neat, formal, geometrically-organized garden. Hedges
extend in a perfect web-like symmetry throughout the landscape. There are topiaries that have
been meticulously shaped with hedge trimmers into living sculptures. Tree-lined allées provide
predictable shade along the straightest, most direct paths possible. All features of the garden
follow a precise form, and all of the garden geometry aligns with the aspect of the great house,
manor, hall, or abbey of the country estate. Nature seems to have submitted to the will of the
gardeners. The precision and artistry with which this landscape has clearly been created convey a
sense of permanence and stability, as though it will exist, unchanging, forever.
That obvious artistry, however, is precisely the point of contention. The very same
artifice that made this garden seem as if it could last forever would render it the target of
sweeping changes. Soon, the garden would be unrecognizable. Just as when the allées and
hedges were first planted and carefully pruned, human hands would be at work again. This time,
however, they would attempt to leave no trace of human art, striving instead to leave all the
credit to Nature.
In eighteenth-century England, wealthy landowners went back to nature – or rather, they
began to create their own, idealized nature. They took an axe and shovel to the very gardens that
16
Joseph Spence and Edmond Malone, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men: Collected from
Conversation (Murray, 1820), 254.
8
had cost previous generations so much to design and implement, replacing the former geometric
gardens, which were clearly the work of human art, with ‘naturalistic’ landscape gardens that
sought to remove all traces of art.
Of course, entirely removing appearances of artifice runs the risk of rendering the artist –
or landscape gardener –obsolete. If nature could have just as easily produced the desired
landscape, why bother achieving the same outcome at the great expense of time and money?
Although the naturalistic garden style did attempt to reproduce the forms of nature, it was not
intended to reproduce nature itself. Take, for example, the recognizably “minimalist” work of
Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, which emphasized the fundamental characteristics of the natural
elements in the landscape. Hunt explains:
Brown used his art to make conspicuous what was there – so water was
encouraged to behave like water, trees to grow to their fullest arboreal potential,
topography answered to its inherent ups and downs, and obvious artifacts
(temples or statues) were banished from the landscape. And nature had
successfully been used to camouflage the landscaper’s art. 17
Although nature is used to “camouflage the landscaper’s art,” Brown’s art is still distinguishable
in the exaggeration of features in the landscape. Note, too, how nature is not merely being “used”
for artistic purposes (the paradoxical concealment of artifice): art is used to perfect nature.
Consider how the trees, thanks to art, “grow to their fullest arboreal potential” and the landscape
“answered to its inherent ups and downs.” Ironically, if art had not intervened, the full
“potential” of these natural features would not have been reached. The concealment of artifice is
accomplished by making nature more essentially ‘natural’ – which is itself accomplished with
art.
17
Hunt, A World of Gardens, 127.
9
Planting the Seeds of the Naturalistic Garden
These new gardens that sought to conceal artifice did not, of course, occur in a vacuum
(or rather, they were not confined to the greenhouse). The development of the naturalistic taste in
gardening came at a moment in history when several factors, many of which transcended the
immediate field of aesthetics, convened to produce an entirely new style of gardening. The
naturalistic style arose from several factors involving international politics, tourism, the
Enlightenment, agriculture, recreation, Romanticism, and, of course, aesthetics.
Nationalism – specifically, the increasing urgency in eighteenth-century England and
France to develop distinct national identities – was one of the most significant factors catalyzing
the development of the English style as an intentionally oppositional aesthetic. 18 As WeltmanAron describes, eighteenth-century treatises on landscape gardening written by English aesthetic
thinkers aimed “to demonstrate that their nation was evidently progressive and free, not under an
absolutist and tyrannical rule, as in France.” 19 Contrasted with the visibly manicured, geometric
gardens of France, ‘naturalistic’ English landscape gardens became a metaphor for the perceived
differences in governmental styles of the two nation-states. The English viewed their own
government as protective of individual liberties, while they viewed the French government as
threatening to personal freedoms. A garden that appeared to work with and imitate nature
implied the protection of individual liberty and autonomy, while a garden that appeared to foist
art upon the landscape connoted a rigid, unbending rule that risked violating an individual’s
freedom. Thus the international power struggle between England and France became internalized
in even the aesthetics of the landscape garden.
18
Brigitte Weltman-Aron, On Other Grounds: Landscape Gardening and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century
England and France, SUNY Series, the Margins of Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001),
2.
19
Ibid.
10
Yet the cultures and artistic inheritances of mainland Europe did galvanize some
emulation of their aesthetics in the English landscape garden by serving as examples of what was
to be avoided. Art produced on canvas rather than landscape inspired this emulation. Wealthy
English landowners traveling through France and Italy on the customary Grand Tour took
inspiration not from the gardens of these nations, but from the seventeenth-century landscape
paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa, which depicted mythological
and biblical scenes set in Arcadian landscapes. 20 Back in England, the wealthy landowners
worked with professional landscape gardeners to create physical landscapes inspired by what
were originally backdrops for Apollos, Venuses, and herdsmen.
These landscapes involved aesthetic qualities known as the sublime, the picturesque, and
the beautiful. Later in this chapter, I will define ‘picturesque’ and ‘beautiful’ and discuss in depth
the significance of these three aesthetic theories to landscape gardening. For now, a brief
discussion of ‘sublime’ will suffice, for the terms ‘picturesque’ and ‘beautiful’ only became
defined after the English landscape gardening movement was well under way.
In the paintings that helped inspire the English landscape garden, including those by
Lorrain, Poussin, and Rosa, ‘sublime’ and another aesthetic term, ‘pastoral,’ best describe the
overall aesthetic qualities of these works. Whereas a sublime landscape might feature impressive,
awe-inspiring escarpments and rock chasms, with a healthy dose of inclement weather thrown in
to further the effect, a pastoral scene would be tranquil and idyllic; it would appear a comfortable
place to enjoy a luxuriant stroll, or to pasture a herd of sheep. Lorrain, Poussin, and Rosa
incorporated the sublime and the pastoral in their work to varying degrees. Lorrain is known for
his pastoral, ‘romantic’ landscapes, Poussin for architectural features set within pastoral
20
All three of these painters lived during the previous (seventeenth) century. Roger Turner, Capability Brown and
the Eighteenth Century English Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 32.
11
landscapes, and Rosa for dramatic scenery evoking the sublime. 21 Figure 1, tellingly entitled
Pastoral Landscape, demonstrates Lorrain’s idealized representation of a pleasant nature; note
the profusion of amply-leaved trees and the calm water. More diversely, Poussin’s Landscape
with a Calm (Figure 2) features both pastoral and architectural features. In greater contrast,
Rosa’s Rocky Landscape with a Huntsman and Warriors (Figure 3) evokes the sublimity of a far
more forbidding Nature. Despite the distinct differences between their individual styles, the
century-old work of Lorrain, Poussin, and Rosa had an impact on landscape gardening as the
movement produced multiple variations on the general theme of emphasizing nature rather than
art.
Figure 1: Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape 22
21
Ibid.
Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape, Oil on canvas, 1647, Timken Museum,
http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/collection-item-image/71.
22
12
Figure 2: Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm 23
Figure 3: Salvator Rosa, Rocky Landscape with a Huntsman and Warriors 24
23
Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm, Oil on canvas, 1651, Getty Museum,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Nicolas_Poussin_%28French_-_Landscape_with_a_Calm__Google_Art_Project.jpg.
24
Salvator Rosa, Rocky Landscape with a Huntsman and Warriors, Oil on canvas, c 1670, Louvre Museum,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Salvator_Rosa__Rocky_Landscape_with_a_Huntsman_and_Warriors_-_WGA20063.jpg.
13
The sweeping influence of the movement known as the Enlightenment, to which scholars
today attribute much of the philosophical, political, and social climates of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, shaped landscape aesthetics as well. The Enlightenment’s prioritization of
natural philosophy (or science), reason, and freedom supported a naturalistic style of
gardening: 25 “The landscape garden was, in a sense, the metaphorical model of this society: the
free will of the Englishman was reflected in the winding stream and the growth of the tree.” 26 As
a result of the Enlightenment, ‘naturalness’ became associated with freedom, so the English
landscape garden’s emphasis on natural features fit well with established Lockean ideals of
liberty. Furthermore, the newly developed style itself reinforced the project of the
Enlightenment: “Naming nature as the ultimate field of investigation, the purpose of knowledge
and the possibility of progress, and all those aims as coextensive with modernity, serves to
naturalize and validate the ends of the Enlightenment itself.” 27 The English style provided
powerful justification for the Enlightenment, framing the intellectual revolution as a wholly
‘natural’ project.
While the Enlightenment may have directly influenced the development of the landscape
garden, the pattern of connections between gardening and dominant cultural modes looks more
like a complex web than a linear, chronological path. Paradoxically, the Enlightenment
contributed to both of the forms of gardening that seem fundamentally opposed to each other: the
French formal garden, which drew inspiration from Renaissance gardens but highlighted even
further the “domination of man over Nature,” and the naturalistic English landscape garden. 28
This apparent paradox can be accounted for by realizing that, despite the English style’s attempts
25
Clemens M. Steenbergen, Architecture and Landscape: The Design Experiment of the Great European Gardens
and Landscapes (New York: Prestel, 1996).
26
Ibid., 239.
27
Weltman-Aron, On Other Grounds, 7.
28
Turner, Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English Landscape, 37.
14
to follow the “genius of the place,” in any ‘improved’ English landscape garden it was implicit
that the landscape had been achieved through the human domination over nature.
Further complicating this web, the Enlightenment itself spawned a knee-jerk reaction
with at least an equal and opposite force: Romanticism. This cultural movement, which was a
“reaction against the order and restraint of classicism and neoclassicism, and a rejection of the
rationalism that characterized the Enlightenment,” developed in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, when English landscape gardening theory and design were already well
established. 29 In the last decades of the eighteenth century, however, the gardening revolution
was still evolving. There are striking thematic parallels between Romanticism and the landscape
garden designs of the late eighteenth century: most notably, those created by Humphry Repton,
Brown’s successor. The precise nature of the relationship between Romanticism and the English
landscape gardening movement is rather difficult to pin down, as both continued to develop
concurrently and within the contexts of other cultural influences. Scholars of English landscape
gardening are understandably reluctant to attribute Romanticism to landscape gardening, and
vice versa, although they tend to acknowledge that some kind of influence existed. What’s clear,
though, is that “during the course of the eighteenth century interest in dramatic scenery greatly
increased,” 30 precisely as both Romanticism and landscape gardening developed. As I will
discuss later in this chapter, the aesthetic concept of the ‘picturesque,’ which figured importantly
in landscape gardening, relies significantly on dramatic scenery. Despite the eventual ridicule of
the picturesque, Romanticism:
29
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘romanticism’ as “a movement in the arts and literature that originated in
the late eighteenth century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. Romanticism
was a reaction against the order and restraint of classicism and neoclassicism, and a rejection of the rationalism that
characterized the Enlightenment.” “Definition of ‘Romanticism.,’” Oxford Dictionaries, accessed April 19, 2014,
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/romanticism.
30
Turner, Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English Landscape, 33.
15
. . . maintained distinctly picturesque modes of proceeding . . . The day of the
ruin, especially artificial ruins and ruins in gardens, may have been over; but the
instinct for the fragmentary, the indistinct or the suggestively incomplete, which
the cult of ruins had imbued, survived . . . 31
The cultural movement known as Romanticism was influenced by the aesthetic concept of the
‘picturesque.’ The picturesque qualities of English landscape gardens are appropriately described
by Hunt as “fragmentary,” “indistinct,” and “suggestively incomplete.” Such characteristics
continued to pepper the cultural products of Romanticism – its books, poems, landscape
paintings, nocturnes, and operas – long after the naturalistic landscape gardening style had fallen
out of favor.
Economics, as a part of the broader English culture within which landscape gardening
developed, precipitated the interest in creating gardens that transformed much of the land on an
estate. The physical landscape upon which the English landscape garden became imposed
existed in part because of agricultural changes that occurred in England from roughly 1500 to
1850. Around the beginning of the sixteenth century, new advances in agriculture set the stage
for the “agricultural revolution” 32 that rapidly developed starting in the eighteenth. More than
ever before, agriculture became economically successful. The increased production of the
countryside earned the landed gentry prodigious amounts of capital. 33 ‘Improving’ their large
estates, or developing hunting parks into gardens, became a surefire method of investing the
money extracted from tenant farmers. Hunting parks became the canvas upon which the
landscape gardeners of the eighteenth century would employ their art.
31
My emphasis. John Dixon Hunt, “Picturesque Mirrors and the Ruins of the Past,” Art History 4, no. 3 (September
1981): 268.
32
For more on England’s “agricultural revolution,” see Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The
Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500-1850, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 23 (Cambridge ;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
33
Steenbergen, Architecture and Landscape, 243.
16
Landscape gardening was not, of course, an art that simply sprang into the English
countryside fully formed; it developed in three distinct, yet connected and interrelated, phases. 34
The first was the Arcadian landscape phase, in which the reverence for classical antiquity that
had emerged with the Enlightenment was enacted in the landscape with marble temples and
statues. The names of the temples in the gardens at Stowe (a country estate located in the
ceremonial county of Buckinghamshire), which include “Dido’s Cave” and “The Temple of
Venus,” 35 are clear examples of the classical influence on what Turner calls the Arcadian
landscape phase. The second was the Ideal phase, which eschewed many of the buildings
characteristic of the Arcadian style in favor of a landscape that focused on “the pure elements:
ground, water and trees.” 36 The third phase, the Romantic landscape, offered views inspired by
what became known popularly as the ‘picturesque’ debate of aesthetics. Turner is able to
distinguish these three periods of the greater English landscape gardening movement because
they fall along the timelines of the individual styles of the most prominent landscape gardeners
of the era. Though each landscape gardener’s style invariably differed in important ways from
the next, the landscapes of the third Earl of Shaftesbury and William Kent reflect the Arcadian
landscape phase, while Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown falls neatly into the Ideal and Humphry
Repton into the Romantic.
The Picturesque, the Sublime, and the Beautiful
34
Turner, Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English Landscape, 37.
Michael Gibbon, “Stowe, Buckinghamshire: The House and Garden Buildings and Their Designers,”
Architectural History 20 (January 1, 1977): 39–40, doi:10.2307/1568349.
36
Turner, Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English Landscape, 38.
35
17
Three aesthetic theories had a bearing on the overall aesthetic of the English landscape
garden. Consciously employed by landscape gardeners, the theories of the picturesque, the
sublime, and the beautiful gave to English gardens the evocativeness that the profession’s status
as an art demanded. As English landscaping professionals sought to evoke particular emotional
responses from garden visitors, they incorporated these theories into the physical landscapes of
the gardens they designed. Landscape gardeners such as Brown and Repton consciously drew on
these aesthetic ideas in their work. 37
Of the three, ‘picturesque’ became the most relevant aesthetic to the English landscape
garden. The Reverend William Gilpin developed the theory of the ‘picturesque’ in several works,
the first of which was published in 1768. Gilpin particularly distinguished the picturesque from
‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful,’ two aesthetic terms that had already been extensively dealt with by
Edmund Burke in 1757. Burke highlighted the contrast in drama and terror between the sublime
and the beautiful. While sublime scenery evoked terror, beautiful scenery was soothing and
tranquil. 38 To explain what he meant by ‘picturesque,’ Gilpin drew a direct connection between
the quality of what he called “smoothness” or neatness and the beautiful, and the quality of
“roughness” and the picturesque. A well-kept, stately building in the Palladian style, as pictured
in Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm, or any one of the tranquil pastoral landscapes of Claude
Lorrain, exemplifies “smoothness” as used by Gilpin to describe the beautiful. “Rough,” on the
other hand, which Gilpin associated with the picturesque, describes more intricate and complex
37
For an example of Repton’s inclusion of the picturesque, sublime, and beautiful in his work, see the Ferney Hall
Red Book he produced, describing the estate both pre- and post-improvement. Humphry Repton, Ferney Hall Red
Book, n.d., http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/repton/redbook.asp?id=FerneyHall.
38
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful., A new
edition. (London, 1793), 113,
http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=whitman&tabID=T0
01&docId=CW3322693546&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE.
18
features, both small and on a landscape scale. Examples include craggy peaks or the bark on a
tree; Rosa’s Rocky Landscape would qualify as a “rough” landscape painting.
The picturesque usually involved man-made features set within a natural landscape.
Gilpin described what would be involved in transforming a folly, or building placed in a
landscape primarily for aesthetic purposes, into a ‘picturesque’ feature:
. . . should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead
of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the
mutilated members around in heaps. In short, from a smooth building we must
turn it into a rough ruin. 39
Though Gilpin himself preferred the picturesque, his description comes across as satirical and
evokes the farcical, overly-dramatic nature of the picturesque, with verbs such as “beat down,”
“deface,” and “mutilate.” And then, of course, there is the slightly absurd idea that one could
simply create a ruin, could manufacture the ravages of time on a building. Here, again, aesthetic
theory leans heavily on the concealment of artifice. A ruin is a building, constructed by humans,
that has been altered substantially by time and weathering – or, in other words, by nature. In
disguising artifice, then, the artist who creates a faux ruin suggests the dominance of nature over
the works of man.
*
*
*
The English landscape gardening movement of the eighteenth century illuminates
multiple facets of the way the social and financial elite interacted with the English landscape,
including conceptions of nature and art. Because the movement defined itself by its naturalism,
one of the most important questions facing aesthetic thinkers became: how should nature and art
39
William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To
Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting. By William Gilpin, M. A. Prebendary of Salisbury; and Vicar of
Boldre in New Forest, Near Lymington. (London, 1792), 7,
http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=whitman&tabID=T0
01&docId=CW3306433519&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE.
19
function and interact in the landscape garden? Unsurprisingly, multiple variations of answers to
this question surfaced. The consensus from the most prominent voices of the period, however,
was that art should aim to ‘imitate’ and improve nature. ‘Imitation’ in the sense used by the
landscape gardeners did not mean exact copying; rather, it was used in the sense of taking
advantage of what were deemed as nature’s best aesthetic qualities. 40 Through this particular
kind of imitation, nature could be ‘improved’ through the process of creating a landscape garden,
which landscape gardeners referred to as “the improvement of the estate.” 41
A primary aesthetic object of such improvement was to inspire the viewer’s imagination.
In Gilpin’s Dialogue Upon the Gardens at Stow [sic], the character Callophilus (whose name
appropriately means “lover of beauty”) alludes to the importance of inspiring imagination
through aesthetics. Here, nature can be ‘improved’ with the aid of art, but only if the addition of
art is kept to a minimum: “‘The Fancy is struck by Nature alone; and if Art does any thing more
than improve her, we think she grows impertinent, and wish she had left off a little sooner.’” 42
Callophilus is directly stating that Art, when applied too liberally to the landscape, can mar the
power of Nature to incite the viewer’s “fancy.” Underlying Callophilus’ statement is the
assumption I want to highlight here: that a primary goal of aesthetic endeavors is to inspire the
imagination.
Such ‘improvements’ to the landscape were not only conceived of with the natural
landscape itself in mind. In the eighteenth century, aesthetic philosophers were accustomed to
understanding the aesthetics of nature through the lens of art, in both painting and poetry. From
40
Hunt, A World of Gardens, 169.
Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels, Johns Hopkins
paperbacks ed (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
42
William Gilpin, A Dialogue Upon the Gardens of the Right Honorable Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in
Buckinghamshire, Reprint edition, Augustan Reprint Society, Publication No. 176 (Los Angeles: University of
California, 1976), 5.
41
20
ancient times, when Horace coined the phrase ut pictura poesis – “as is painting, so is poetry” –
through the nineteenth century, poetry and painting were regularly referred to as “sister arts.” 43
According to the humanistic theory of painting, the art “had to depend on poetry, both as model
and source, for subject, content, and purpose.” 44 With the advent of landscape gardening, a third
sister joined the family. Highlighting the close relationship between the three arts, ‘picturesque’
theorist William Gilpin proclaimed, “Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the Science of
Landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who
dress and adorn nature.” 45 Note here in particular Gilpin’s emphasis on the task of the sister arts
to “dress and adorn nature” – as though nature itself was not quite up to the task of being
sufficiently beautiful. The arts of poetry, painting, and gardening needed to be employed in order
to fully reveal nature’s beauty.
A century earlier, painter Claude Lorrain expressed a similar belief that nature alone
could not satisfy human standards of beauty, remarking that he “was convinced that taking
nature as he found it seldom produced beauty.” 46 As an art that aimed in part for beauty,
landscape painting, like the art of landscape gardening, was not merely intended to copy
precisely what an artist saw with his eyes. A painter’s job was to emphasize the general forms
found in nature, choosing the most beautiful compositions of these forms. As the English
landscape gardening movement developed throughout the eighteenth century, its pioneers
described the aesthetics of their art using the terms they would in studying a painting. In William
Gilpin’s Dialogue Upon the Gardens at Stow [sic], penned in 1748, the two interlocutors
43
Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.,
1967), 3.
44
George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University
Press, 1971), 45.
45
John Dixon Hunt, “Introduction.,” in A Dialogue Upon the Gardens at Stow (Los Angeles, 1976).
46
Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses on Art, as cited in Turner, Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English
Landscape, 33.
21
repeatedly refer to the landscape they are walking through as though it is a painting, using
concepts such as proportion and “Point of Sight,” or focal point. 47 Gilpin’s Dialogue is one of
the first texts incorporating ideas common to both painting and English landscape gardening,
such as the concept of the ‘picturesque,’ and painting and gardening would remain closely
associated throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth.
Repton, who carried the torch of landscape gardening in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, adopted this painter’s frame of mind. As Repton developed his own
theories of gardening aesthetics, he chose the term “landscape gardening” for his profession –
previously, it had been referred to merely as ‘improvement’ and ‘gardening’ – precisely because
of his belief that “the art can only be advanced and perfected by the united powers of the
landscape painter and the practical gardener.” 48 By combining the terms landscape, which was at
that time most commonly associated with painting, and gardening, Repton emphasized the
indebtedness of his profession to the long history of the aesthetic theories of landscape painting.
Repton cautioned, however, against treating a landscape garden too much like a painting, and
pointed out several distinctions between the two. Repton gave the example of how the observer
of a garden experienced it while in motion, walking through the landscape, whereas the view an
observer of a landscape painting sees is perpetually stationary. 49 “Real landscape, or that which
my art professes to improve, is not always capable of being represented on paper or canvas,”
Repton wrote. 50 He also stressed the importance of not mistaking landscape gardening for
painting because of utility: landscape gardens were not mere objects of aesthetic pleasure, as the
47
Gilpin, A Dialogue Upon the Gardens of the Right Honorable Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in
Buckinghamshire, 15.
48
Repton and Nolen, The Art of Landscape Gardening, 3.
49
Ibid., 53.
50
Ibid., 54.
22
poet Mason seemed to believe, but were meant to be lived in, along with the great houses they
adjoined:
I am not less an admirer of those scenes which painting represents; but I have
discovered that utility must often take the lead of beauty, and convenience be
preferred to picturesque effect, in the neighbourhood of man’s habitation.
Gardening must include the two opposite characters of native wildness and
artificial comfort, each adapted to the genius and character of the place, yet ever
mindful that, near the residence of man, convenience, and not picturesque effect,
must have the preference, wherever they are placed in competition with each
other. 51
Because gardens surrounded real, human residences, they needed to have some practicality. To
attempt to actually create an entirely picturesque, Claude-like landscape garden would be
impractical and “absurd.” 52 Rather than devote so much attention to aesthetics that the utility of
the park-like landscape was lost, Repton advised balancing aesthetics with “convenience,” even
prioritizing this characteristic over picturesque quality close to the estate’s house or manor. It is
significant, too, that Repton considers the human needs of comfort and wildness at such odds
with each other. These “two opposite characters” make the landscape gardener’s job a difficult
one, for their work must find a way to successfully harmonize two qualities that are so radically
disparate.
Though nature could be studied and represented through art – Gilpin’s “Science of
Landscape” – there remained a rather mysterious metaphysical quality about both nature and art
that was referred to as “Genius.” 53 The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose aesthetic musings on
gardening in the early eighteenth century anticipated the changes to the art that were to appear in
the latter half of the century, conceived of genius as a generative force in three senses: the
51
Ibid., 57.
Ibid., 157.
53
"Genius" today is used almost exclusively in reference to artistic genius, Shaftesbury's "genius of the creative
mind.”
52
23
“genius of the place, of the creative mind, and of the natural world.” 54 Genius was a ‘naturally’
occurring quality of creativity that inspired the production of both nature and art. In nature,
genius was visible in the productivity, diversity, beauty, and unpredictability of life. An artist
could tap into a ‘genius’ that was their individual creative wellspring, yet it was not by their own
doing; genius came from outside themselves, from Nature itself.
In ancient Rome, genius loci, which literally translates as “spirit of the place,” indicated
“the sacredness of a place.” 55 The genius of the place became a crucial part of landscape
gardening theory as the art developed in the eighteenth century. It was poet Alexander Pope, who
became heavily involved in the improvement of his estate Twickenham, who first advised
gardeners to “consult the genius of the place in all.” 56 Capability Brown and Humphry Repton
would both dutifully follow this advice. Repton, in Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening,
noted the importance of “a due attention to the character and situation of the place to be
improved.” 57 As an art that combined natural features and human artifice, landscape gardening
demanded a sensitive treatment of the land itself, even as Repton and others sought to alter it.
Ignoring the particularities of a place incurred the risk of creating a poorly-executed landscape, a
danger that could be costly in both financial and aesthetic terms.
While the concept of a “genius of the place” originated with the Roman conception of
genius loci, however, much of the metaphysical, spiritual quality that the Romans associated
with genius loci did not follow the term to its usage in England in the eighteenth century.
Repton’s allusion to the “genius of the place” did not so much imply metaphysical qualities as
54
David Leatherbarrow, “Creative Movement in Shaftesbury and Early Romanticism,” Umeni / Art 56, no. 6
(December 2008): 506.
55
Argyro Loukaki, “Whose Genius Loci?: Contrasting Interpretations of the ‘Sacred Rock of the Athenian
Acropolis,’” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, no. 2 (June 1997): 308, doi:10.2307/2564372.
56
Alexander Pope, “Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV,” The Poetry Foundation, accessed February 9, 2014,
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174160.
57
Repton and Nolen, The Art of Landscape Gardening, 7.
24
the physical realities of the ‘lay of the land’: the hills and valleys, slopes and flats, depressions
where water collected, and the places where trees, shrubs, and grasses had naturally taken root.
The genius loci of the Romans were conceived of as spirits that inhabited the various aspects of
the landscape – streams, soil, and trees, for example. “Genius of the place” as used by landscape
gardeners, however, did not imbue the landscape with spiritual beings.
Yet in the art of gardening, as in its sister arts, a metaphysical “genius” remained. The
“geniuses” of the artist and the natural world could not be traced back to the empirical
characteristics of a landscape. Schlegel described this concept of an artistic genius inspiring both
nature and artists as an “indwelling power.” 58 Inherent in this notion was the idea that nature’s
variety, complexity, and productivity were derived from a universal, creative source – a
wellspring that an artist might, through genius, also be able to tap into. The genius of the natural
world, in Shaftesbury’s time, was what made nature ‘Nature’ with a capital ‘N’: genius, or the
“indwelling power” of nature, personified the natural world.
58
Leatherbarrow, “Creative Movement in Shaftesbury and Early Romanticism,” 504.
25
Chapter II
Painting the Landscape with Words
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is
read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely
that the novel is more true than they are.
- G.K. Chesterton 59
As the landscapes ‘painted upon’ the estates of English landowners, English landscape
gardens were not only experienced in person, but were also re-imagined on a different canvas:
literary fiction. Jane Austen, who wrote her novels around the turn of the eighteenth century,
incorporated English landscape gardens into the landscapes of Northanger Abbey, posthumously
published in 1818, and Mansfield Park, published in 1813. Writing in Germany around the same
time, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe transposed the English landscape gardening style, which had
become popular in his own country, onto a German estate in his novel Elective Affinities
(published as Die Wahlverwandtschaften in 1809). In all three of these novels of manners,
English landscape gardens function as spaces in which character dynamics and social mores are
symbolized and made visible. In addition, these novels reveal the prominence of the English
landscape garden and its aesthetics in contemporary society. Goethe makes the garden into a
complex and extended metaphor. Both authors use the garden as a setting and symbolic space for
the novels’ engagements with the vices and virtues of social mores.
Picturesque Theory in Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen’s inclusions of the English landscape garden and its aesthetics in Northanger
Abbey and Mansfield Park provide an understanding of how garden theory and aesthetics
59
G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: John Lane Co., 1905), 192.
26
permeated polite conversation in upper-class society. As an author of novels of manners, Austen
is known for her sharp portrayal of relations among fictional, yet true-to-life, upper-class
characters in English society. One might say that Austen, with her keen intuition for behavior
and manners, is experienced in the art of ‘imitation.’ As already discussed, for landscape painters
and gardeners, imitation of nature meant the highlighting of nature’s best qualities rather than
strict copying. Austen, too, achieves an imitation of nature, in the sense that she creates
characters whose behaviors are representations, and also exaggerations, of the manners Austen
herself discerns in the ‘natural’ setting of her society.
The verisimilitude of Austen’s characters is aided in part by the topics of conversation
which her characters broach. The presence of the aesthetic theory of the ‘picturesque’ in
Northanger Abbey, couched as it is within the imitative, though caricatured, upper-class society
within which Austen sets her novels, illustrates the prominence of the concept of the picturesque
in English culture. In the eighteenth century, the ‘picturesque’ was not an esoteric term, at least
within the upper echelons of society. Instead, it was a term understood and discussed in depth.
The scene in which the picturesque appears is a conversation between Henry Tilney, Catherine
Morland, and Henry’s sister Eleanor as the three walk in the countryside near Bath. Henry and
Eleanor are discussing the landscape as though it is a canvas, judging its value in terms of being
adaptable to a drawing or painting. Catherine, still naïve, inexperienced, and unassimilated into
the fashionable society embodied at Bath, does not know anything of the picturesque until Henry
clues her in:
They were viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing,
and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness
of real taste. Here Catherine was quite lost. . . . a lecture on the picturesque
immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began
to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest, that
he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked
27
of fore-grounds, distances, and second distances – side-screens and perspectives –
lights and shades; – and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar, that when they
gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as
unworthy to make part of a landscape. 60
Catherine, initially “quite lost,” feels distinctly out of the loop until Henry educates her on the
concept of the picturesque. Until she becomes, to use a term from psychology, ‘socialized’ in the
language of aesthetics, Catherine is clearly lacking what was then an important facet of high
culture. Upon her schooling about the picturesque by Henry, Catherine’s yearning to understand
the concept reveals the importance to her of being able to speak the same language of the
members of the upper-class society. Catherine’s keenness to become a true member of this elite
group, which she also exhibits in the fashionable ballrooms of Bath, extends to her eagerness to
learn aesthetic theories and to be able to appreciate beauty.
In addition to interpreting the passage above as an indicator of English upper-class
fluency in aesthetic theories, a comprehensive reading must acknowledge the context in the
novel within which this scene surfaces. Austen, in addition to being known for writing novels of
manners, was an accomplished satirist, and Northanger Abbey is her most satirical novel. The
scene in which Henry Tilney educates Catherine Morland about the picturesque functions as a
satire both of Catherine and of the debate about the picturesque. Catherine’s naivety in believing
she can immediately grasp the picturesque comes across as comical. Although Catherine is an
eager learner, she can’t develop from naïve young girl to tasteful gentlewoman in the span of a
single lesson. After only a short lesson from Henry, she was “so hopeful a scholar” that she
“voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.” 61
Catherine’s appraisal of the city of Bath as “unworthy” to be called picturesque comes so
60
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. John Davie and James Kinsley (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 80.
61
Ibid., 81.
28
astonishingly soon after her first learning the meaning of the term ‘picturesque’ that the
narrator’s tone comes across as quite tongue-in-cheek. Catherine’s evaluation is also a little bit
farcical because the picturesque doesn’t apply to urban settings anyways; the very fact that Bath
is a city makes the whole question of whether it is ‘picturesque’ a moot point. The narrator’s
satirizing of the picturesque debate demonstrates the prominence of the picturesque debate in the
upper echelons of English society: it was so common, so well-recognized and ingrained into the
language of that culture, that it could be made farcical.
The ‘Improvement of the Estate’
In addition to unequivocal references to aesthetic theory, Northanger Abbey and
Mansfield Park also engage significantly with the ‘improvement of the estate.’ When Catherine
visits Woodston, the parsonage that has been bestowed upon Henry, she envisions the household
she dreams of someday creating with him. As she is given a tour of the house, Catherine voices
her delight at the pleasantness of the rooms and their views. In particular, the view from the
unfurnished drawing-room pleases her greatly. The exchange between Catherine and General
Tilney on the view from this room illustrates the extent to which both characters see the view in
terms of the aesthetics of landscape gardening. Catherine remarks, followed by General Tilney’s
response:
“Oh! what a sweet little cottage there is among the trees – apple trees too! It is the
prettiest cottage!” –
“You like it – you approve it as an object; – it is enough. Henry, remember that
Robinson is spoken to about it. The cottage remains.” 62
Catherine’s interest in the cottage as “an object” of the landscape, in General Tilney’s words,
suggests that her impression of the Woodston grounds mirrors the perspective a landscape
62
Ibid., 158.
29
gardener seeking to improve the estate, like Repton, might have. The cottage functions on the
Woodston estate as did a folly in one of Repton’s ‘improved’ landscapes. In addition, from
General Tilney’s decisive response “the cottage remains,” it is clear that the cottage is not by any
means a feature necessary for the functioning of the estate as an economic entity; the pleasure
Catherine receives from the cottage as an object of the landscape may have been the only reason
the cottage wasn’t demolished.
If ‘the improvement of the estate’ surfaces as an important element in Northanger Abbey,
it is certainly indispensable in Mansfield Park. The word ‘improvement’ appears in the novel a
total of thirty-one times, in multiple meanings. There is, of course, ‘the improvement of the
estate,’ but the narrator also speaks of Fanny’s ‘improvement’ in manners, bearing, intellect,
personality, health, age, and beauty. As she grows from child to young woman in the refined
environment of Mansfield Park, Fanny’s mien becomes cultivated in the customs of the English
upper class. The narrator also writes of the improvement in Mary Crawford’s manners that
Fanny is momentarily hopeful of, though she is sorely disappointed in her optimism. Finally,
when Fanny takes her younger sister Susan under her wing, she sets about the task of
‘improving’ Susan’s intellect and personality – and therefore her prospects in life – by assigning
books for Susan to read.
The improvement of Fanny Price is a project undertaken by her aunts and uncle as an act
of charity. Fanny, the daughter of an unscrupulous mother and a negligent father, has been born
into a family situation that gives her few prospects for enjoying a comfortable and fashionable
life like that of her cousins Maria and Julia. She arrives at Mansfield Park at the age of ten to be
given the advantages of an education and introduction to upper-class society. The project of her
‘improvement’ most concerns her manners, intellect, and charisma. Fanny is arguably the
30
weakest of all Austen’s heroines, and never fully dispenses with her timidity and self-effacing
manner – which partly explains why “posterity has found it far harder to like Fanny Price, with
all her self-doubt and modesty.” 63 Still, she grows markedly stronger as a character throughout
the novel, even repeatedly asserting her own will to refuse the advances of Henry Crawford. His
apparent devotion and eventual marriage proposal present her with the opportunity to acquire a
respectable status as the wife of a gentleman. Fanny, however, having already seen Henry’s
egregiously flirtatious behavior towards the engaged Maria Bertram, refuses to choose what is
easy over what appears to her to be morally right. Fanny’s piety in turning away from this
opportunity comes at a great cost, and even fractures her relationship with her uncle Sir Thomas.
Yet her unshakeable attention to duty is rewarded in the end, when Henry Crawford’s elopement
with Maria Bertram makes it clear that Fanny averted marital disaster and perpetual unhappiness.
And so Fanny’s ‘improvement’ in assertiveness turns out to be perhaps the most significant event
of her life.
The improvement of the estate in Mansfield Park also plays an important role in the
novel. As in Northanger Abbey, Austen’s choice to include explicit references to landscape
gardening in Mansfield Park highlights the centrality of garden aesthetics in English society as a
common topic of conversation. In Mansfield Park, several characters first discuss the
improvement of the estate in the context of Sotherton Court. Mr. Rushworth, who owns
Sotherton and is engaged to Maria Bertram, has just returned from the estate of a friend who
recently “had his grounds laid out by an improver” 64 – none other than the real-life figure of
Repton himself. Speaking with the family at Mansfield Park, Mr. Rushworth laments the
unfashionable state of his own property:
63
Claudia L. Johnson, “Introduction,” in Mansfield Park (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1998), xii.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, 1st ed, A Norton Critical Edition (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 38.
64
31
“It wants improvement, ma’am, beyond any thing [sic]. . . .”
“Your best friend upon such an occasion,” said Miss Bertram, calmly, “would be
Mr. Repton, I imagine.”
“That is what I was thinking of. As he has done so well by Smith, I think I had
better have him at once.” 65
The characters conversing in this scene use the term ‘improvement,’ referring to the estate, with
clear familiarity. The conversation continues with a discussion of the price of Repton’s services
and speculation about what changes to the landscape at Sotherton Repton would design. This
referral to the improvement of the estate and Maria Bertram’s casual name-dropping of Humphry
Repton suggest the prominence of landscape gardening as a subject of discussion among the
upper echelons of English society. Mr. Rushworth’s assessment of the landscape as wanting
improvement exemplifies his awareness of the aesthetics of landscape gardening. The character
dialogues in Mansfield Park make use of landscape gardening aesthetics in discussions of the
improvement of the estate.
The Estate as Symbol
In addition to undergoing improvement, the estate itself plays a prominent symbolic role
in both Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park. It is no coincidence that these are Austen’s two –
and only two – novels titled after settings rather than characters (as in Emma) or personality traits
(as in Pride and Prejudice). Austen’s choice to title Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park after
the two chief settings in these novels highlights the personification of these estates into places
symbolic of their respective social dynamics. The estates take on the qualities of the
interpersonal relationships that take place within them.
In both novels, the personified eponymous estates are placed in direct contrast with their
foils, Woodston Parsonage and Sotherton Court. Catherine’s vision of Woodston’s future
65
Ibid., 39.
32
‘improvement’ contrasts significantly with the garden already in existence at Northanger Abbey.
This contrast in setting is largely due to the opposing versions of domestic life that Woodston
and Northanger Abbey personify in the novel.
The first point of divergence involves the creative potential of each estate. Woodston,
like a blank canvas, brings the promise of years spent enjoying the creative process of
‘improving’ the estate grounds. In contrast, Northanger Abbey’s ‘improvement’ has already been
completed, so that there is little or no creation of the garden space to look forward to. Ownership
of domestic property is more than merely a matter of finances; it also involves the ability of the
landowners to feel they have created a place of their own. For Catherine, a landscape that
appears a blank canvas, at least from the perspective of someone with even minimal knowledge
of aesthetic concepts such as the picturesque, provides the opportunity of personal investment in
the land. Northanger Abbey, on the other hand, is in many ways the epitome of the past;
Catherine’s initial fascination with the Abbey stems from her imagination of what had happened
there in the past. The Abbey appeals less and less to Catherine as the novel progresses, in part
because she grows more interested in the active creation of history than in its uncovering. When
Catherine visits Woodston, she is able to envision this future of creating, in contrast with the
comparatively stagnant landscape of Northanger Abbey, which has already been ‘improved’ by
Henry’s father. As Catherine matures throughout the novel, her priorities shift away from a lurid
fascination with the apparently-gruesome history of the Tilney family, towards the hope of
raising her own, halcyon one with Henry.
More broadly, Woodston stands for the tranquility of a happy domestic life, whereas
Northanger Abbey represents a domestic life fraught with the unhealthy power dynamics
between a father and his children. The strict demeanor Catherine perceives of General Tilney
33
turns out to be more than merely a mildly unpleasant character flaw. Although the General is not
by any means the murderer Catherine originally believes him to be, his relationship with his
children is not by any means cozy. When the General departs Northanger Abbey for London for
a week, the narrator describes the improvement in the mood of the Abbey’s inhabitants that
Catherine notices. “The happiness with which their time now passed . . . made her thoroughly
sensible of the restraint which the General’s presence had imposed, and most thankfully feel
their present release from it.” 66 General Tilney’s severity of personality is such that his own
children do not feel at ease when he is at home. The General’s reprehensibility of comportment
is further exemplified when Henry finally tells Catherine the real reason why his father had
turned her out of the house. That the General did so because he had discovered Catherine was not
to receive a large dowry, as he had been led to believe, reveals the baseness of his character, and
Catherine realizes that her misgivings about the General were not so amiss after all: “Catherine,
at any rate, heard enough to feel, that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or
shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.” 67
General Tilney’s abhorrent behavior casts a shadow over the estate he heads and contributes
significantly to the cementing of Northanger Abbey as a symbol of troubled domestic life, in
great contrast to the ‘picturesque’ scene of a comfortable estate that Catherine finds at
Woodston.
Long before Catherine finds out about the General’s repugnant behavior, however, she
herself steps across the line demarcating ‘proper’ manners when she comes to the unreasonable
and embarrassing conclusion that the General had murdered his late wife. The seed is planted in
Catherine’s mind by the Gothic novels she had been reading, and it germinates as she is walking
66
67
Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, 162.
Ibid., 183.
34
across Northanger Abbey’s landscape garden with the General and Eleanor. The General’s
apparent disdain for the path his late wife used to favor strikes Catherine as highly suspicious.
“The General certainly had been an unkind husband. He did not love her walk: – could he
therefore have loved her?” 68 Catherine takes the General’s avoidance of his late wife’s favorite
path through the landscape garden as evidence of his cruelty towards her, and after collecting a
few more tidbits about Eleanor’s mother that seem to evidence the General’s cruelty towards his
wife, she concludes that General Tilney had murdered his wife. Originating with her reading of
The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine’s suspicion grows like a weed as she collects faulty
evidence in the abbey and landscape garden – and produces a rather poisonous fruit. The
bitterness of that fruit, of her own folly, does not soon fade from Catherine’s mind when she is
chastised by Henry Tilney for the “dreadful nature” of her suspicions. 69
Just as tranquil Woodston Parsonage is a foil for the forbidding Northanger Abbey,
Mansfield Park is established as a clear contrast to Sotherton Court. Whereas Fanny comes to
adore Mansfield Park as her favorite place in the world, Sotherton becomes associated with
immorality -- specifically, indecency of conduct between both engaged and unengaged
characters. While visiting Sotherton, Fanny witnesses multiple infringements of the polite
manners of English society, the most egregious of which is the improper familiarity between Mr.
Crawford and Miss Bertram, who is already engaged to Mr. Rushworth. As Fanny sits
overlooking the ha-ha, Miss Bertram, Mr. Crawford, and Mr. Rushworth come walking up to the
locked gate. When Mr. Rushworth has gone back for the key, an exchange between Mr.
Crawford and Miss Bertram illustrates their unscrupulous behavior:
“Your prospects, however, are too fair to justify want of spirits. You have a very
smiling scene before you.”
68
69
Ibid., 132.
Ibid., 145.
35
“Do you mean literally or figuratively? Literally, I conclude. Yes, certainly, the
sun shines and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that haha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. I cannot get out, as the starling
said.” 70
This snippet of the conversation between Mr. Crawford and Miss Bertram is replete with thinlyveiled insinuations. Mr. Crawford’s use of the word “prospects” is a reference to Miss Bertram’s
engagement to Mr. Rushworth. In the context of the too-familiar way in which Mr. Crawford and
Miss Bertram have been interacting, his remark comes across as a sly provocation of her
dissatisfaction with her engagement. Miss Bertram’s coyness in asking whether Mr. Crawford is
speaking literally or figuratively confirms the double meaning of his words. In addition, her own
observation that the “‘iron gate [and] ha-ha’” make her feel confined, like the caged starling, is a
clear allusion to her discontent with the behavioral restraint imposed upon her by her
engagement. Whether Fanny comprehends these insinuations, which are infringements of social
mores in and of themselves, is not addressed by the narrator; regardless of whether she does,
however, they provide context to help the reader grasp the flagrancy of the social faux pas that
happens next. When Miss Bertram and Mr. Crawford decide to hop over the gate rather than wait
out of consideration for Mr. Rushworth, Fanny intuits the impropriety of this act: she “felt that
[Mr. Rushworth] had been very ill-used.” 71 Fanny’s witnessing of this breach of manners at
Sotherton links the landscape garden of the estate, which is still ‘unimproved,’ with immorality.
The behaviors of Miss Bertram and Mr. Crawford, like the landscape within which they become
visible, want ‘improvement.’
In contrast to the reprehensible conduct for which Sotherton provides a setting, Mansfield
Park is the site of Fanny’s ‘improvement’ in multiple senses. The importance of Mansfield Park
to Fanny has primarily to do with the improvement in her physical health that the estate park
70
71
Austen, Mansfield Park, 71.
Ibid., 72.
36
facilitates and the favorable emotional and intellectual setting it provides. When she arrives at
the estate as a child, Fanny is physically weak and disposed towards ill health, ostensibly
because she has grown up in the dirty, unwholesome environment of her parents’ home in
Portsmouth. As Fanny grows from girl to young woman, Mansfield Park facilitates the
improvement of her health by providing an expanse of park acreage within which she can go
horseback riding, an activity which her cousin Edmund considers essential to keeping up her
good health.
Mansfield Park becomes a symbol of Fanny’s emotional and intellectual development as
well. Initially ignorant of her fondness for the estate, Fanny finally becomes aware of the depth
of her attachment to Mansfield Park after an absence of three months from the estate. Intending
to impress upon Fanny the grievous mistake he believes she is making in rejecting Henry
Crawford’s generous offer of marriage, Sir Thomas arranges for her to visit her parents so that
she can attain some perspective on the indispensability of a comfortable domestic life:
He certainly wished her to go willingly, but he as certainly wished her to be
heartily sick of home before her visit ended; and that a little abstinence from the
elegancies and luxuries of Mansfield Park, would bring her mind into a sober
state, and incline her to a juster [sic] estimate of the value of that home of greater
permanence, and equal comfort, of which she had the offer. 72
Sir Thomas’s hope is that Fanny will be so put off by the disorderliness of her parents’ home that
she will be frightened into marrying Henry Crawford. While Fanny and Henry never end up
tying the knot, Sir Thomas’s scheme does succeed in making Fanny conscious of the value of her
privileged upbringing. Her visit to her parents’ home causes Fanny to recognize for the first time
the societal advantage that growing up at Mansfield Park has given her.
While visiting her parents, Fanny constantly compares the physical and emotional scene
she finds in her Portsmouth home with that of Mansfield Park. She also perceives the value of
72
Ibid., 250.
37
Mansfield Park as a place that provides her ample access to natural beauty. During her absence,
Fanny becomes painfully aware of her own connection to the natural landscape at Mansfield
Park:
It was sad to Fanny to lose all the pleasures of spring. She had not known before
what pleasures she had to lose in passing March and April in a town. She had not
known before, how much the beginnings and progress of vegetation had delighted
her. – What animation both of body and mind, she had derived from watching the
advance of that season which cannot, in spite of its capriciousness, be unlovely,
and seeing its increasing beauties, from the earliest flowers, in the warmest
divisions of her aunt’s garden, to the opening of leaves of her uncle’s plantations,
and the glory of his woods. 73
Fanny’s regret of missing Mansfield Park’s springtime evinces her deep fondness for nature.
With words such as “delighted,” “beauties,” and “glory” that convey Fanny’s enjoyment of the
season, the narrator shows us spring at Mansfield Park through Fanny’s newly-opened eyes.
Growing up at Mansfield Park, riding horseback through the parklands, Fanny has always been
responsive to nature, but her time in the urban landscape of Portsmouth has sensitized her to the
privilege of having access to so much nature in her own backyard. Apart from the refreshing
walk on the ramparts on an “uncommonly lovely” 74 day, Portsmouth cannot provide the
experience of nature that Fanny has become accustomed to enjoying at Mansfield Park; instead,
Portsmouth symbolizes boundedness and uncleanliness. Fanny’s newfound appreciation for the
natural environment at Mansfield Park is an expression of a different kind of ‘improvement’ she
has undergone during her visit to her childhood home. Rather than the improvement Fanny
achieves during her years at Mansfield Park as she is surrounded by nature, this kind is gained
from the disconcerting absence of nature. It is partly by experiencing the lack of a natural
landscape at Portsmouth that Fanny comes to fully appreciate the estate grounds of Mansfield
Park.
73
74
Ibid., 293.
Ibid., 278.
38
Elective Affinities
. . . man is a true Narcissus, he makes the whole world his mirror. 75
The landscape garden of Elective Affinities acts like a canvas for character dynamics,
mirroring the struggle between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ that is present within the novel’s
characters. When these two systems fail to match up, relationships become strained and
consequences ensue. Tragic mishaps and social faux pas that occur as a result of the creation of a
landscape garden mirror the novel’s tragic and socially-unacceptable shifts in relationships.
At the heart of Elective Affinities lies a chemical metaphor that conveys the relationship
dynamics of the novel. The metaphor appears during an evening when Charlotte and the Captain
are listening to Eduard read aloud from a book on chemistry. Charlotte, who is uncertain of the
meaning of the word “affinity,” asks the men to describe the chemical concept. A lengthy
explanation follows, in which Eduard and the Captain use examples from simple chemical
interactions to convey the idea.
“Affinity,” or the attraction between two different substances, they explain, can be seen
in the “desire for union” that lime exhibits in the presence of all acids. 76 When combined with an
acid, lime fizzes vigorously as the reaction releases carbon dioxide. The fizzing is evidence of a
chemical reaction, meaning that elements have separated and combined again, creating new
compounds. In this case, the elements initially bound together in limestone and acid separate and
recombine to form gypsum and carbon dioxide. At the end of the conversation the Captain
cements the image of separation and recombination using “the language of signs”: “‘Imagine an
75
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, L242
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 50.
76
Ibid., 53.
39
A intimately united with a B, so that no force is able to sunder them; imagine a C likewise
related to a D; now bring the two couples into contact: A will throw itself at D, C at B.’” 77 This
swapping of chemical partners is the key locus of the concept of elective affinity, as the Captain
describes:
“. . . what we call limestone is more or less pure calcium oxide intimately united
with a thin acid known to us in a gaseous state. If you put a piece of this limestone
into dilute sulphuric acid, the latter will seize on the lime and join with it to form
calcium sulphate, or gypsum; that thin gaseous acid, on the other hand, escapes.
Here there has occurred a separation and a new combination, and one then feels
justified even in employing the term ‘elective affinity,’ because it really does look
as if one relationship was preferred to another and chosen instead of it.” 78
As the Captain’s explanation implies, “elective” is placed in front of the word “affinity” because
of the apparent selectiveness driving the chemical swap. The Captain’s use of the words
“preferred” and “chosen” highlights this appearance of a chemical exertion of will in even more
anthropomorphic terms than the word “elective” itself conveys. 79 Of course, at no point in the
conversation does any character ascribe actual willpower to chemicals; no one disputes that they
are inanimate entities without any kind of ability to sense or think, much less express preference.
As the Captain points out, however, “it really does look as if” choice was involved in the
physical change. And so one “feels justified” in using the word elective as a modifier for affinity.
Charlotte, however, takes issue with the description of affinity as a chosen quality. Even
though the word “elective” merely refers to the appearance of choice, and none of the three
characters actually believe that the chemicals themselves choose to behave in the way they do,
alluding to choice would seem to convey a kind of free will exerted by the elements, an
interpretation which Charlotte sees as inaccurate. “I would never see a choice here but rather a
77
Ibid., 56.
Ibid., 54.
79
The original German title, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, has also been translated as Kindred by Choice. Derek
Glass, Dr. Matthew Bell, and Martin H. Jones, Goethe in English: A Bibliography of the Translations in the
Twentieth Century (MHRA, 2005), 241.
78
40
natural necessity . . . the choice seems to me to lie entirely in the hands of the chemist who
brings these substances together.” 80 In Charlotte’s eyes, ascribing free will to the compounds that
are observed to separate and recombine is a mistake. Her use of the phrase “natural necessity”
particularly conveys her view of the overriding power of the circumstances in which the
substances are placed. Once they are brought together by a chemist, the chemicals are entirely
ruled by their natural properties and behave according to preexisting laws of interaction. When
human individuals take the place of the chemicals, God would take on the role of the “chemist”
Charlotte alludes to. Although Charlotte does not directly refer to a divine being, the position of
this discussion within the novel must necessarily insinuate the role of divine fate in bringing
together two lovers. When the discussion is no longer just about chemicals, but implies the
interactions between human relationships, the stakes are raised. Since Charlotte and Eduard are
married, a separation of their relationship would be a societal transgression. One can imagine
why Charlotte would reject the idea of an “elective” affinity, of the individuals involved having
choice in the matter. By raising the possibility that divine fate is the real force at work, Charlotte
limits her own culpability in adultery.
As the metaphor is borne out in the novel, Charlotte’s interpretation of affinity as having
less to do with choice than with a “natural necessity” comes to define the changes in
relationships that occur within Elective Affinities. In these relationships, and consequently within
the characters themselves, we can distinguish what I refer to as a struggle between nature and
society. Here, I use ‘nature’ to refer to the inherent inner spirit of the characters, their emotional
intuition that compels them to act in certain ways. In the novel, this inner nature is entirely
separate from the rational mind. ‘Society,’ on the other hand, is shorthand for the social mores
and laws the characters abide by, which exist as part of the rational organization of society. The
80
Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1971, 54.
41
genteel society portrayed in Elective Affinities operates under a rational set of rules of conduct:
rules delineating proper etiquette at table, how to dress, and what behaviors are appropriate
between married and unmarried persons.
Inner nature, unlike ‘rational’ society, operates through a character’s intuition, what
Charlotte calls a “natural necessity.” In Elective Affinities, when obedient to her inner nature, a
character acts upon an innate instinct; when obedient to the proscriptions of her society, she acts
under its rationale. Nature and society tend to demand incompatible behaviors of the four central
characters. When a character acts in line with nature, he or she is often going against the rules of
society, and vice-versa. In order to act at all, characters must either consciously choose to heed
society’s moral code, or – driven more by their inner nature than by choice – obey “natural
necessity.” Characters sometimes heed this natural imperative, and act in accordance with the
intuition of their inner natures; in other cases, they act in obedience to the rules of society.
The opposition between nature and society is not the ‘Nature vs. culture’ dichotomy that
has been so thoroughly discussed by scholars of environmental studies, which pits capital-N
Nature against collective humanity’s strivings to inhabit environments. The primary distinction
between this Nature and a character’s inner nature is that the former functions under a rational
system that can be understood through scientific study, while the latter, as a metaphysical entity,
defies investigation. Yet there is Nature in Elective Affinities, and the extent to which characters
interact with Nature in the novel frequently matches up with the degree to which they follow the
behests of their inner natures versus those of society. These varying character affinities for
Nature and nature determine the ways in which they each create and experience the landscape
garden, as well as catalyze tragedy within it.
42
In Elective Affinities, marriage is the key social good that most significant character
interactions involve, and discussions of the place of marriage in culture are what primarily define
society’s rationality. The most significant of these character dialogues take place in a series of
discussions on the topic at which both Charlotte and Eduard are present. The chain of dialogue
begins immediately after the narrator reveals that two soon-to-arrive visitors to the estate, a
Baroness and a Count, had fallen “passionately” into adulterous love with each other, “not
without scandal.” 81 In the novel, the couple functions as a cautionary tale of the social faux pas,
the “scandal,” that ensues when a marriage contract is broken. For Charlotte and Eduard, who
remain close friends with the Baroness and the Count even after the latter two have breached the
social contract of marriage, the societal transgression that these two characters have committed is
notable, but not unpardonable. “They had always remained on good terms, even if you could not
always approve of everything about your friends.” 82 With these words, the narrator
acknowledges that Charlotte and Eduard recognize the faux pas that their friends have
committed, but also that it doesn’t destroy the friendship between the four.
For Charlotte and Eduard’s friend Mittler, however, the Count and Baroness’s breaking
apart of their marriages is an egregious violation of the sanctity of marriage. Mittler, whose name
literally means “mediator,” 83 routinely takes it upon himself to resolve disputes, especially
marriage troubles. “This singular gentleman was in earlier years a minister of religion.
Unflagging in his office, he had distinguished himself by his capacity for settling and silencing
81
Ibid., 88.
Ibid.
83
Ironically, though Mittler acts as a mediator, he is no clairvoyant medium, for he is remarkably blind about the
potential consequences of Charlotte and Eduard inviting Ottilie and the Captain to their estate. When they consult
his advice about whether or not to invite Ottilie and the Captain, Mittler scoffs at their hesitancy and gives no
indication at all that to do so might complicate their marriage. His inability to grasp the possible repercussions of
inviting these two people to live at the estate suggests that he perceives Eduard and Charlotte’s marriage to be
stable. Thus, when their marriage is disrupted by the presence of Ottilie and the Captain, the disturbance comes
across as all the more socially irrational, as going against the expected stability of their relationship. Ibid., 34.
82
43
all disputes, domestic and communal . . .” 84 Unsurprisingly, Mittler is the most outspoken
proponent of marriage in Elective Affinities, and is the primary character to emphasize the
importance of marriage to the society with which the novel’s characters engage. The day after
the narrator relates to the reader the scandalous history of the Baroness and the Count, Mittler
visits Charlotte and Eduard, on the same day that the offending couple is to arrive. When he
discovers that the Baroness and the Count are on their way, Mittler exclaims, “I will not stay
under one roof with that pair,” 85 thus condemning their infringement of marriage.
“Whoever attacks marriage,” he cried, “whoever undermines the basis of all
moral society, because that is what it is, by word not to speak of by deed, has me
to reckon with. . . . Marriage is the beginning and the pinnacle of all culture. . . .
As for separation, there can be no adequate grounds for it.” 86
For Mittler, marriage is a moral good that is the cornerstone of society as well as its zenith, “the
beginning and the pinnacle of all culture.” Society operates under a rigid system of rational
precepts, held up by the institution of marriage. It is a contract that must not be broken under any
circumstances; “there can be no adequate grounds for it.” Breaking the contract through adultery,
divorce, or separation is simply not an option. In Mittler’s view, to violate marriage is to divorce
society from its rational foundation: when this cornerstone is weakened, the walls of society
itself come tumbling down.
While Mittler clearly considers marriage to be an unbendable societal contract, do
Charlotte and Eduard feel the same way? Mittler speaks passionately of the indissolubility of
marriage, of its importance to society and culture, but the narrator is conspicuously silent about
his tirade’s reception, saying nothing of how it is received by Charlotte and Eduard. Mittler’s
departure is abrupt, as the carriages of the Baroness and the Count soon drive into the courtyard.
84
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 89.
86
Ibid.
85
44
There is no mention of Charlotte and Eduard even telling Mittler goodbye. He seems to be
forgotten the instant the Baroness and the Count arrive: “Our friends hurried to meet them and
Mittler hid himself and had his horse brought him and rode off in annoyance.” 87 Even assuming
Charlotte and Eduard did hear and understand what Mittler was saying, their attention shifts
rapidly from his energetic defense of marriage to the two people in their social circle who are
most infamous for violating its precepts. Charlotte and Eduard’s silence and the haste with which
they trade the company of Mittler for that of the Baroness and the Count suggests that either they
are comparatively indifferent about the sanctity of marriage, or they tragically do not hear the
cautionary words of their mediator friend.
Charlotte and Eduard do not appear indifferent to the importance of the marriage
contract, however. When the Count makes a joke ridiculing marriage, Charlotte shows great
sensitivity to the significance of this social institution. “She knew well nothing is more
dangerous than too free conversation in which a culpable or semiculpable situation is treated as
normal, commonplace, or even praiseworthy; and anything that impugns the marriage tie
certainly comes into this category.” 88 Charlotte’s alarm at the Count’s “too free conversation”
indicates that she is, indeed, quite conscious of the importance of marriage as a social good.
Strong diction that includes the words “dangerous,” “culpable,” and “impugn” emphasizes her
receptiveness to the precariousness of a callous treatment of marriage. Twice, she attempts to
steer the conversation away from the “dangerous” subject, only succeeding on the second
attempt.
While Charlotte engages in the conversation with concern at the Count’s disparaging
portrayal of marriage, Eduard, in contrast, participates only sparsely in the conversation. The
87
88
Ibid., 90.
Ibid., 93.
45
sole comment he makes is that marriage makes people boring to society: “As things are now,
once we are married no one bothers himself further about either our virtues or our
shortcomings.” 89 Rather than noting, as Charlotte and Mittler do, the foundational role marriage
plays in society, Eduard implies that marriage is actually a detriment to society. At this point in
the novel, Eduard’s insouciance about marriage is unsurprising, considering how much his
feelings for Ottilie have grown. His attitude towards marriage has slid remarkably effortlessly
from affection for his wife, to devotion to Ottilie. Charlotte, too, has developed an extramarital
affinity, with the Captain, but has exhibited much more restraint around the Captain than Eduard
around Ottilie. Compared with Eduard’s lack of concern about his affection for Ottilie, Charlotte
is much more disturbed by her growing attraction to the Captain.
In Elective Affinities, then, marriage functions as a constitutive part of society with its
own set of rules. Individual characters interpret these precepts in widely varying ways; Mittler
and Charlotte see the rules of marriage as far more unbending than Eduard does. These rules
exist within a carefully-ordered web of societal organization, a web that is arranged in a way that
the members of the society perceive as comfortingly rational.
Affinity, however, cuts and tangles the strands of this web. The elective affinity between
Eduard and Ottilie is developed throughout the novel with their interpretation of a coincidence as
destiny and with the language of all-consuming passion the two characters employ. When
Eduard discovers “the most miraculous coincidence” that he planted his beloved plane-trees on
“the day, the year when Ottilie was born,” 90 he sees their mutual affinity as destined. Eduard’s
interpretation of the coincidence implies that he privately believes that divine fate – the hands of
the chemist – is intentionally bringing him and Ottilie together. When he leaves the estate, it is
89
90
Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 122.
46
not to deprive himself of the pleasure of being with Ottilie; he does so to give himself over
completely to dreaming of being with her. Eduard shamelessly confesses to Mittler, “I think
about her constantly, I am always with her.” 91 His love for Ottilie has become all-consuming.
This intensely passionate love is recognizable in another of Goethe’s novels, The Sorrows
of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther). Compare Eduard’s fervent affirmation of
love with Werther’s avowal of his love for Lotte: “Waking or asleep, she fills my entire soul!” 92
Werther and Eduard, obsessed with Lotte and Ottilie, respectively, do not hold back from
confessing their adamant love to their respective confidants Wilhelm and Mittler. The chemical
metaphor of elective affinity, however, is certainly most appropriate in the case of Eduard and
Ottilie because of the mutual nature of their attraction: D (Ottilie) is attracted to B (Eduard) as
much as B is attracted to D. The love between Lotte and Werther is dissimilar to the affinity of
Ottilie and Eduard in one particularly significant way: Werther’s love for Lotte is all-consuming,
but Lotte herself is able to control her emotions. In this aspect of her personality, she is rather
like Elective Affinities’ Charlotte and the Captain, who muster up the self-control to resist the
influence of the metaphorical chemist. While Lotte’s love for Werther is strong, it is by no means
comparable to the love Ottilie readily expresses for Eduard. Ottilie is by nature more reserved
than Eduard, yet she “lives only for Eduard.” 93 Her love is as passionate and all-consuming as
his. The mutuality and apparent destiny of Ottilie and Eduard’s love strengthens the narrator’s
portrayal of their love as ‘naturally’ affined.
In addition, the fervent language Eduard uses in his discussion with Mittler also alludes
to the ‘naturalness’ of the affinity he and Ottilie share: “I have never loved before, it is only now
91
Ibid., 144.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorrows of Young Werther, by J. W. von Goethe,” eBook, trans. R. D.
Boylan, Project Gutenberg, 2009, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2527/2527-h/2527-h.htm.
93
Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1971, 118.
92
47
I know what love is. . . . it comes so naturally to me.” 94 The opposition between nature and
society that I have already distinguished is especially present here. Eduard’s love for Ottilie,
which “comes so naturally” to him, is so zealous that he completely disregards the former,
weaker fondness he had for Charlotte, and now regards his marriage with Charlotte as entirely
devoid of love. Nature, or Eduard’s affinity for Ottilie, wins out over society: the laws of
marriage do not hamper Eduard from asserting his love for Ottilie.
Charlotte and the Captain also share an apparently ‘natural’ attraction to each other, yet
because of their greater prudence are able to contain their love more successfully than Eduard
and Ottilie. The Captain, perceiving that he is “becoming attached to her irresistibly,” makes
himself “avoid appearing during the hours Charlotte [is] usually in the park.” 95 By using the
word “irresistibly” to describe the Captain’s attachment to Charlotte, the narrator suggests that
the two, like a pair of “affined” chemicals, are fundamentally attracted to each other. Although
Charlotte and the Captain’s outward behavior is somewhat more restrained, their affinity is so
intense that their souls, like Eduard and Ottilie’s, appear inseparable. The following passage
conveys the power of the attractions between both Eduard and Ottilie and Charlotte and the
Captain:
In the lamplit twilight inner inclination at once asserted its rights, imagination at
once asserted its rights over reality. Eduard held Ottilie in his arms. The Captain
hovered back and forth before the soul of Charlotte. The absent and the present
were in a miraculous way entwined, seductively and blissfully, each with the
other. 96
The naturalness of the affinities between the two newly-formed couples is evoked by the
narrator’s use of the phrase “inner inclination.” In addition, the clear contrast between this “inner
inclination” and “reality” is similar to the ‘nature vs. society’ tension I discuss. The law of
94
Ibid., 146, my emphasis.
Ibid., 80.
96
Ibid., 106.
95
48
attraction has “asserted its rights” over the “reality” of Eduard and Charlotte’s physical nearness
and the law joining them together in matrimony. Here, too, inner nature seems to have triumphed
over social mores. The clash between these two entities is all the more striking in this scene
because of the ironies of the absent being prioritized over the present, and of the setting in which
it takes place. Charlotte and Eduard are implicitly engaging in intercourse – this becomes clear
later, as I will illustrate, when Charlotte gives birth to a son – in Charlotte’s bedroom, the locus
of their marriage. As a married couple, they are in exactly the proper place in which to engage in
conjugal relations, and they do so – physically. Metaphysically, however, the act of intercourse
takes place not between husband and wife, but between Eduard and Ottilie, and Charlotte and the
Captain. The scene’s “lamplit twilight,” a phrase which conveys an enigmatic atmosphere,
combines with the extramarital love burning within the four characters’ souls to enable a
“miraculous” mixing of the absent and the present.
The clear affinities between Eduard and Ottilie, and Charlotte and the Captain, break the
bond that had previously existed between Charlotte and Eduard. Although Eduard and Charlotte
had once “loved very dearly” 97 – an expression which, with its use of the dispassionate word
“dear,” suggests the lukewarm love they shared – their marriage years later seems to have been
one of convenience, a partnership they entered into so as to live a comfortable life together. The
first image of the novel – Eduard “grafting new shoots he had just obtained on to the young
trees” 98 – acts as a metaphor for Charlotte and Eduard’s relationship. Like the practice of
grafting trees, their bond is both economical and artificial. The expediency of their match is clear
in Charlotte’s rationalization of their marriage as a way for Eduard to “recover at [her] side from
97
98
Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 19.
49
all the distresses [Eduard] had experienced at court, in the army, on [his] travels.” 99 When she
uses the wistful words “I like so very much to think back to when we first knew one another,” 100
and “[w]e rejoiced at what we remembered, and there was nothing to hinder our living together
again,” 101 Charlotte suggests that what was initially only a fondness for each other, barely
passable as an affinity in the sense of compatibility, has since cooled further.
At the point in the novel at which Ottilie and the Captain join the married couple on their
estate, however, Charlotte and Eduard are still very much a team. Their marriage is part of what
helps keep them working well together. Elective Affinities is peppered throughout with
metaphorical references, many of which refer back to the original extended metaphor of
chemical affinity. One such reference, which reinforces the respective functioning of natural
affinity and marriage, comes as the mason gives the address at the laying of the pavilion’s
foundation-stone:
“This foundation-stone, whose firm corner denotes the firm corner of the
building, whose square-cut form denotes the regularity of the building, whose
perpendicular and horizontal position denotes the trueness of the walls without
and within – this stone we might now lay without further ado: for by its own
weight it would rest firm. Yet here too there must be lime and cement: for, as men
who are naturally inclined to one another hold together better when they are
cemented by the law, so too bricks whose shapes are already well matched are
better united by this binding force . . .” At this he handed his trowel to Charlotte,
who threw a trowelful of lime under the stone. 102
Is the foundation-stone a metaphor for the “natural necessity” of the attractions between the
characters? The lime and cement certainly is a metaphor for the societal contract of marriage.
The mason directly states that people “hold together better when they are cemented by the law,”
and in the society of Elective Affinities, marriage acts as the cement that strengthens the bond
99
Ibid., 23.
Ibid.
101
Ibid.
102
Ibid., 83.
100
50
between two people. As Mittler observed during his tirade against the violation of marriage, it is
a contract that sometimes requires two people to endure the difficulty of going against their inner
inclination. “Marriage may sometimes be an uncomfortable state, I can well believe that, and that
is as it should be.” 103 But a stone seems so reliable, so sturdy, so unchanging, whereas the love
between Eduard and Ottilie is so full of uncontrollable passion. Perhaps the metaphor of the
stone, then, is meant to emphasize the incontrovertibleness of the affinities between Eduard and
Ottilie, and, to a lesser degree, Charlotte and the Captain. A stone is undeniably there, and, in
particular, the cornerstone is the stone without which the building cannot exist. It determines the
shape and the aspect of the whole rest of the building; the foundation-stone makes the building
what it is. Marriage may be the cement holding people together, but their inner natures provide
the fundamentals of who they are.
Elective Affinities is by no means exclusively focused on marriage, but it is without a
doubt the most prominent social institution in the novel, becoming the subject of dialogue and
the primary locus of character tension as the novel progresses. Based on their individual
attunements to inner nature, the four central characters stand by marriage to varying degrees, and
their individual prioritizations of marriage “map” onto these characters’ differing levels of
interaction with nature. Each of these four characters in Elective Affinities has their own, unique
blend of self-restraint versus self-indulgence, of obedience to social mores versus gratification of
the yearnings of their inner nature. Despite their individual differences, the characters fall into
two cohorts distinguishable by their personalities. Eduard and Ottilie together fall on the
passionate, self-indulgent end of the spectrum, while Charlotte and the Captain are both more
rationally-minded and exhibit more self-control. The narrator’s description of the way each
couple acts in the landscape garden adroitly characterizes this division:
103
Ibid., 90.
51
They went for longer walks and when Eduard hurried ahead with Ottilie to find
out new paths and to break new ground the Captain and Charlotte quietly
followed talking seriously and taking an interest in many newly-discovered spots
and many unexpected vistas. 104
While Eduard and Ottilie move through the garden with a haste that suggests the gratification of
their curiosity, Charlotte and the Captain walk “quietly” behind, with greater restraint and
attention to the details in the landscape that Ottilie and Eduard overlook. The couples’
movements through the landscape garden, as described by the narrator, functions as a metaphor
for how they go about their individual roles relating to the improvement of the estate. Charlotte
and the Captain adopt a scientific, procedural method of planning changes in the landscape,
exerting a great deal of control over nature, whereas Eduard and Ottilie appear connected to a
more wild nature in the landscape garden.
Charlotte’s self-command in the interest of upholding societal values is paralleled by the
control she expresses through her alterations to the landscape garden. Specifically, this is visible
in her choice of creating a domestic space within the landscape garden and in her rational, but
emotionally-insensitive, modifications of the cemetery. Ever the rationalist, Charlotte takes a
duteous stance towards her marriage with Eduard, recognizing that while she feels a strong
attachment to the Captain, she must not allow herself to become consumed by her love for him.
In general, Charlotte is without a doubt the more rational, emotionally-restrained spouse. She
manages the finances of the estate meticulously and conservatively and strives to ensure they
have no unnecessary expenses. In a scene during which Eduard, Ottilie, and the Captain are
envisioning building a bridge at an inlet to the lakes “to shorten the route and add beauty to the
landscape,” Charlotte inserts her pragmatism into the conversation “by reminding them of the
104
Ibid., 73.
52
cost such an undertaking would involve.” 105 Self-control is her creed, so when Charlotte finds
herself tempted by her affinity for the Captain, she is alarmed at the sensation of letting her
characteristic discipline slip. The scene in which the Captain kisses her – a kiss “which she had
almost returned,” 106 inducing her shame at her own feelings – acts as a jolt to her impetus
towards self-control. To regain control over her emotions, Charlotte makes the difficult choice to
ask the Captain to leave, denying herself of romantic satisfaction in deference to her higher
valuation of social dignity:
You must go, dear friend, and you will go. The Count is now making
arrangements which will make a better life for you: I am very glad of it
and very sorry. . . . I can forgive you, and forgive myself, only if we have
the courage to alter our way of life, since it does not lie within our power
to alter our feelings. 107
Charlotte’s decision to encourage the Captain’s departure is an exceedingly painful one. “I am
very glad of it and very sorry,” she says to indicate that she feels the opportunity that lies before
the Captain is a blessed release from the temptation to commit adultery, yet is agonizing to
accept. Her use of the word “courage” conveys the torment she feels at the thought of being
parted from the Captain. It is by no means easy for Charlotte to decide she and the Captain must
part, and the extent to which she suffers in doing so evinces the strength of her loyalty to
marriage as an incontrovertible rule of her society.
Charlotte’s reminiscence on the roles she and Eduard adopted at the beginning of their
marriage sums up the different relationships with nature that the two have: “I took charge of
affairs indoors, you of affairs outdoors.” 108 Charlotte’s design and building of the moss-hut
reflects this difference. While placed in the landscape garden, the moss-hut is solidly a domestic
105
Ibid., 75.
My emphasis. Ibid., 111.
107
Ibid., 113.
108
Ibid., 23.
106
53
space, a satellite of the main house of the estate. I do not mean to suggest that Charlotte is
exclusively involved in household matters and never takes an interest in the nature of the
landscape garden, but the majority of her engagement in the estate is in the arrangement of the
house and the moss-hut, and the economy of the estate as a whole. Her relationship with nature
is, on the whole, minimal.
The Captain, too, while deeply influenced by “natural necessity,” is able to reign in his
feelings for Charlotte enough to avoid scandal. The Captain is a dignified character to whom
social rules, such as marriage, are important. The greatest lapse in the Captain’s self-control
comes when he kisses Charlotte at the edge of the three lakes. “He put his arms around her again
and kissed her violently on the mouth. But that same moment he was lying at her feet, pressing
his lips to her hand and saying: ‘Charlotte, will you forgive me?’” 109 The Captain’s immediate
expression of remorse for his forwardness is his regaining of self-command, and evinces how
natural it is for him to return to that state. Most of the time, while he feels a deep affection for
Charlotte, the Captain is able to keep his emotions contained.
In a similarly rational, controlled manner, the Captain’s role in relation to the nature of
the estate is that of a scientist as he goes about the work of surveying the landscape. “‘The first
thing we ought to do,’ said the Captain, ‘would be for me to make a compass survey of the area.
It is a simple and pleasant job, and if it doesn’t ensure absolute accuracy it is always useful and
makes a good beginning . . . ’” 110 The Captain goes about the task meticulously and carefully,
even though the survey is only a “simple” job that cannot guarantee “absolute” precision. It is ‘in
his nature,’ to use the expression, to conduct his work in this rational manner. Later, when
Eduard mars the Captain’s “carefully and neatly drawn plan” by roughly sketching Ottilie’s idea
109
110
Ibid., 111.
Ibid., 39.
54
for a pavilion into the plan, the Captain feels “a stab of pain” 111 at Eduard’s carelessness.
Similarly to Charlotte’s cautiousness about overspending, the Captain is cautious about ensuring
that alterations to the landscape do not create dangerous situations. “The Captain would now
have liked to advise altogether against converting the three lakes into one great lake. The lower
dam had to be strengthened, the middle dams removed, and the whole thing was in more than
one sense momentous and dubious.” 112 The Captain’s inclination to abandon the plan to create
three lakes from one is in keeping with his general cautiousness and rationality in going about
work, as well as romance. His inner nature impels him to love Charlotte, yet the Captain is
usually able to master this impulse because social mores are important to him, just as he strives
to prevent disaster with careful engineering of the landscape.
Eduard, on the other hand, is much less able to control his emotions, and consistently
exerts almost no effort at self-moderation once he has developed an affinity for Ottilie. In a
statement that foretells Eduard’s behavior when Ottilie becomes his obsession, the narrator
remarks early in the novel, “Eduard was not used to denying himself anything.” 113 When the
Captain leaves the estate, Charlotte holds out to Eduard the opportunity to repair their
relationship:
“Our friend has left us,” she said. “We are now back together as we were before,
and it is now up to us whether we want to go back completely to our former life.”
Eduard, who heard nothing but what flattered his passion, believed that by these
words Charlotte meant her former state of widowhood and that she was, if in an
indirect way, holding out to him the hope of a divorce. 114
Eduard is so consumed by his love for Ottilie that he “heard nothing but what flattered his
passion,” misconstrues what his own wife is saying as the precise opposite of her meaning,
111
Ibid., 77.
Ibid., 119.
113
Ibid., 27.
114
Ibid., 129.
112
55
which is that they could send Ottilie back to school (this, for him, is unfathomable). He seems to
entirely miss the first part of what she says, “we are now back together,” which he should have
recognized as an acknowledgement of their closeness as a married couple. Furthermore, his
genuine hope for a divorce illustrates the power of his inner nature over his deference to social
mores. Eduard’s faulty interpretation of Charlotte’s words illustrates the contrast between the
two with regards to prioritization of the laws of society versus the impulse of inner nature.
Eduard has abandoned the will to remain in his marriage with Charlotte, while she is determined
on doing so.
Eduard’s contribution to the landscape garden, in contrast to Charlotte’s, directly
involves nature. From a young age he has taken an interest in nature; as a boy, he “rescued” the
plane-trees his father had “uprooted while he was laying out a new section of the big walled
garden,” 115 by planting them at the edge of the lake. Eduard’s own words suggest that he
considers his relocation of the plane-trees to be doing nature a service. The uprooting of the
trees, and Eduard’s replanting of them, creates a scene of contrast between his father’s expansion
of the walled garden – an expression of mastery of nature – and Eduard’s own transplanting of
the plane-trees in a comparatively natural, unbounded space.
Ottilie’s interactions with social rules and nature are the most complex of the group of
four. Her actions and own principles are often contradictory and change throughout the novel.
Ottilie is portrayed as a dutiful niece who strives to be helpful to Charlotte in any way she can; as
a naïve and innocent girl, not yet even a young woman; and as sensitive to proper and improper
social behavior. Thus it is all the more shocking when she acts counter to the rules of marriage in
her society. At first shy and demure, Ottilie does not forwardly express affection for Eduard. But
as he grows fonder of her and begins to express his infatuation, she encourages his advances. For
115
Ibid., 39.
56
example, after Eduard notices that Ottilie’s handwriting has begun to mimic his own and
exclaims, “Ottilie, you love me!” 116 she does not reproach him. Instead, she affirms Eduard’s
declaration with a tender embrace: “And which first embraced the other you would not have
been able to say.” 117 It’s not a matter of Eduard instigating the embrace and Ottilie passively
receiving him; she, too, actively holds him. Ottilie acts in such a way that the reader grasps her
complicity in the love affair, yet the narrator is able to characterize her as saintly. “. . . she sensed
that Eduard had been torn from her for a considerable time. . . . We cannot attempt to describe
her anguish and her tears. She only prayed to God that he would help her get through this
day.” 118 By simultaneously noting that Ottilie prays to God for guidance, yet is agonizingly
reluctant to give up her adulterous relationship with Eduard, the narrator characterizes Ottilie as
faithful, yet tempted into violating the societal law of marriage. She is a paradox: a saintly figure
who commits the sin of loving a married man.
I have observed that Ottilie’s observance of social mores is the most complex of the four
characters; Ottilie’s relationship with nature is similarly complex and significant in meaning, as
it does a radical about-face in the novel. Initially, the narrator gives no indication that she has
any attachment to nature at all:
All her thoughts were directed towards the house and the domestic life rather than
towards the world outside and the outdoor life. Eduard soon noticed that it was
only to oblige them that she went with them on their walks, that it was only out of
a sense of social duty that she lingered with them outside in the evenings, and
then she often found some household task as an excuse for going in. 119
This passage comes early in the novel, just as the four are making plans for laying the
foundation-stone of the pavilion. At this time, as the passage above signifies, Ottilie is almost
116
Ibid., 109.
Ibid.
118
Ibid., 136.
119
Ibid., 78.
117
57
exclusively interested in household matters and shows no interest in the landscape garden, even
though its improvement is the primary project of her three companions. In coming on walks with
the other three despite her lack of interest, Ottilie shows a strong “sense of social duty.” She
knows her social responsibilities and, when she obligingly comes on walks through the landscape
garden in which she has no interest, Ottilie acts in a way that honors them.
As the novel progresses, however, and the attachment between Ottilie and Eduard grows,
Ottilie soon adopts a different attitude towards the landscape garden. The garden, formerly a
place she only visited in deference to her companions, becomes the very place she cannot stay
away from. The narrator remarks, “Very often she would hurry out of the house at daybreak, out
of the place where she had formerly found all her happiness, into the open, into the country
which had formerly had no attraction for her.” 120 By contrasting Ottilie’s current zeal for going
outdoors – the word “hurry” conveys some of this enthusiasm – with her former lack of interest
in doing so, the narrator draws attention to the fact that a profound change has occurred in
Ottilie’s behavior. Though the narrator does not explicitly state that Ottilie is now interested in
the landscape garden because of her love for Eduard, this contrast between habits old and new is
implicitly connected with their romance. Because Eduard is drawn to the outdoors, Ottilie
absorbs his preference and imitates it with her own actions. She associates the landscape garden
with Eduard, so while he is away, walking through the garden serves as a solace for her anguish
at losing him. Naturally, a place of significance to Eduard becomes sacred to Ottilie: her favorite
walk leads to Eduard’s plane-trees. In the garden, close to Eduard’s handiwork and away from
the presence of Charlotte, Ottilie is free to dwell on him and on the moments they have shared in
the garden together. “They had sown some of the flowers together and planted all the plants, and
120
Ibid., 141.
58
now everything was in full bloom . . .” 121 Through the flowers and plants that Eduard and Ottilie
had planted, Ottilie finds Eduard in the landscape, even as he is many miles away during his selfimposed exile. Surrounded by the nature that is so beloved by him, Ottilie cannot resist
immersing herself in the landscape at every opportunity. Just as Ottilie breaches the rules of
marriage because she finds the instinct of her inner nature irresistible, that same intuition leads
her to take pleasure in the landscape as she never had before loving Eduard.
The conflict between inner nature and the rules of society, happening within each of the
characters, becomes manifest in tragedies that occur in the English landscape garden that
Charlotte, Eduard, and the Captain together create. This manifestation operates like the fizzing of
lime when it is brought into contact with acid: the breakdown in the proper functioning of the
landscape garden provides visible evidence of a reaction, of characters A, B, C, and D who
escape their pre-existing bonds and form new unions. In fact, while Hollingdale translates
Charlotte’s concession to allow the Captain to be a guest at the estate as “[l]et us make a trial of
it,” other translators use the word “experiment” in place of trial, emphasizing the scientific
metaphor of elective affinities. 122 The ‘fizzing’ occurs at a few particular points of breakdown in
the normal functioning of the garden: 1) the collapse of the dam, which nearly kills a boy, 2) the
fatal danger of the artificial lake, in precipitating the death of the baby, and 3) the violation of the
sanctity of gravesites that occurs when Charlotte has the headstones moved for aesthetic reasons.
In each of these collapses in typical garden operation, the narrator makes no clear value
judgment on the morality of ‘affined’ love. Rather, the narrator is reflecting on the impossibility
of choice that can arise when nature and society go against each other, when what is forced to
appear ‘natural’ – for example, a relationship – is in fact artifice.
121
Ibid., 140.
Ibid., 35; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities : A Novel (New York : Collier, 1966), 32,
http://archive.org/details/electiveaffiniti00goetuoft.
122
59
The artifice in the landscape comes about as a result of the characters’ undertaking of the
‘improvement of the estate.’ In Elective Affinities, improvement primarily involves the creation
of a large lake, the construction of a pavilion and paths leading to it, the clearing of “bushes and
grass and moss” from underneath Eduard’s plane-trees, 123 and the beautifying of a cemetery.
Although Charlotte has been informally ‘improving’ the estate by building the moss-hut and
having the cemetery leveled (more on that later), the English-inspired ‘improvement of the
estate’ formally begins when Eduard and the Captain introduce the English landscape gardening
style. “[L]et us this evening take out the English books giving descriptions of parks with
copperplates,” 124 the Captain suggests. The narrator of Elective Affinities describes the books and
how the characters make use of them:
They presented an outline of each region and a view of the landscape in its
original natural condition, then on other pages the changes art had made upon it
so as to take advantage of and enhance every existing good feature. From this it
was very simple to pass over to their own property, to their own environs, and to
what might be made of them. 125
As Ann Leone discusses, the narrator’s description of the “English books giving descriptions of
parks,” which show “the landscape in its original natural condition” and with “the changes art
had made upon it,” is strongly suggestive of the Red Books Repton used to show his clients the
changes he recommended. 126 Though Repton is not mentioned by name in Elective Affinities, as
he is in Mansfield Park, this description of the English books intimates that Goethe may have
had Repton’s style in mind as he wove the landscape gardening aspects into the novel. Goethe,
like Austen, was writing during the height of the English landscape gardening movement and
Repton’s tenure. In addition, the narrator’s description elucidates the books’ aim to imitate
123
Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1966, 149.
Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1971, 68.
125
Ibid., 69.
126
Ann Leone, “The Reptonian Turn: Reassessing Landscape Design in Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Studies in the
History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 31, no. 1 (2011): 26–39, doi:10.1080/14601171003683722.
124
60
nature, to “take advantage of and enhance every existing good feature,” connecting this fictional
scene to the historical legacy of nature-imitation handed down from landscape painters to
gardeners.
Despite the characters’ consultation of English landscape gardening style, the
improvement of the estate in Elective Affinities results in the collapse of the dam holding back
the single large lake. The artificial unification of the three smaller lakes is an attempt to
emphasize the water as an “existing good feature,” 127 but what it unintentionally emphasizes is
Eduard’s adulterous love for Ottilie. Already fervently in love with Ottilie and no longer
attempting to hide his affection, Eduard wants several ‘improvements’ in the landscape garden,
including the joining of the three natural lakes into one, to be completed for her birthday. Eduard
spares no expense to express his love for Ottilie through the improvement of his estate. In the
context of Eduard and Ottilie’s forbidden love, the sudden failing of the dam holding back the
unified lake comes as an omen: “. . . several people could be seen falling into the water. The
earth had given way under the pressure and trampling of the ever-increasing crowd.” 128 The
failure of the dam, though due to a physical weakness of the earth, does not function in the novel
as a mere tragic circumstance. The event reads as an omen largely because of Eduard’s
adulterous behavior even after this emergency occurs: at the very moment that Charlotte is
rushing to help with the revival of a boy who appears to be dead, Eduard insists on carrying on
with the fireworks show, which he intends to be entirely for Ottilie, as planned. The boy is
ultimately saved, but the near-tragedy is caused and compounded by the adulterous affinity
between Eduard and Ottilie, and is a manifestation in the English landscape garden of the
consequences of the struggle between nature and society going on within these two characters.
127
128
Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1971, 69.
Ibid., 124.
61
The conflict between social mores and the ‘natural’ affinities of souls in Elective
Affinities eventually does make the artificial lake the site of a fatal disaster: the death of Charlotte
and Eduard’s infant son. If we return to the scene in Charlotte’s bedchamber, in which
imagination usurps reality as she and Eduard are making love, and consider the remarkable
resemblance of their child to both the Captain and Ottilie, the disaster registers as a consequence
of this conflict. Recall that, even as Charlotte and Eduard had embraced each other, each had
envisioned holding someone else: “Eduard held Ottilie in his arms,” while “[t]he Captain
hovered back and forth before the soul of Charlotte.” 129 The characters who are “absent” in
reality are made present through imagination and inner nature.
The miraculousness of their presence is not wholly realized until much later in the novel,
when the narrator remarks on the child’s “twofold resemblance” to both the Captain and Ottilie:
“In his features and figure he was coming ever more to resemble the Captain, his eyes were
becoming ever less distinguishable from Ottilie’s.” 130 Although the narrator perceives that
Charlotte’s son looks strikingly like the Captain, we can rule out actual adultery because it’s
implied that the child really is Eduard’s child. The narrator never mentions or insinuates that the
unmarried, “affined” couples actually consummated their adulterous love. Furthermore, the
comparison of the child’s eyes to Ottilie’s suggests the miraculousness of the child’s
resemblance of someone who could not possibly have begotten the child. Considering, then, that
the infant is biologically Eduard and Charlotte’s son, the scene in Charlotte’s bedroom takes on
additional mystical power. Ottilie and the Captain’s imagined presence, and the affinities of their
souls with Eduard and Charlotte’s, somehow impart the absent characters’ physical attributes to
the child. Upon first seeing the child months after its birth, Eduard instantly perceives the
129
130
Ibid., 106.
Ibid., 248.
62
biologically impossible resemblance and exclaims, “this child was begotten in twofold
adultery!” 131 – though without remorse, for Eduard sees the resemblance as justification for
being with Ottilie. The child is mystically conceived out of the ‘natural’ affinities of souls, yet is
a contradiction of the natural law of offspring resembling their parents.
I interpret the scene in which the infant drowns in the lake as an annulment of this
contradiction, a restoration to the ‘natural’ order of things, the unbending plans of fate. It is as
though Nature, and the artifice of the lake, conspire to undo the unnatural act. Although I have
been emphasizing the impulse of (inner) nature and the laws of society, Nature has a system of
laws all its own in the novel that must not be subverted. If the child resembled the Captain
because it had been conceived out of wedlock and was biologically his son, the laws of society
would have been severely violated, but the Natural rule of “like begets like” would not have been
shattered. In Elective Affinities, this Natural law is allied with fate. In her grief, Charlotte finally
recognizes that fate, or the will of the chemist, i.e. God, cannot be manipulated:
I agree to the divorce. I ought to have agreed to it earlier; through my hesitation
and opposition I have killed my child. There are certain things which fate is
obstinately determined upon. Reason and virtue, duty and all that is sacred,
oppose it in vain; something is to happen that seems right to fate, even if it does
not seem right to us; and so, do what we will, fate at last prevails. 132
Charlotte concedes that her resistance to the natural affinities that developed in contradiction to
the bonds of marriage created an unnatural situation that ran counter to fate. Like the inevitable
reshuffling of elements that occurs when a chemist brings lime into contact with acid, the natural
affinities that existed between Eduard and Ottilie and between Charlotte and the Captain
produced an unavoidable rearranging of relationships. Note from her diction, however, that
Charlotte does not repudiate the claims of marriage, which she implicitly invokes with “reason
131
132
Ibid., 260.
Ibid., 266.
63
and virtue, duty and all that is sacred,” words that convey her enduring respect for the value of
marriage even as she acknowledges the power of fate. Where Charlotte speaks of the difference
between what “seems right to fate” and what seems right to humans, she is alluding to the
conflict between inner nature and society. Charlotte views the death of her son as a consequence
of ignoring the natural attractions between Eduard and Ottilie, and herself and the Captain. With
her frank words “I have killed my child,” she takes responsibility for having been set upon
upholding social mores, when fate was “obstinately determined upon” working through inner
nature.
Recall that placing the word elective in front of affinity invokes the appearance of choice
exhibited by the substances involved; they are not, of course, actually acting under their own
will. In the context of Charlotte’s admission of the role of fate in the extra-marital affinities of
her household, the metaphor appears flawed. Where is the “electivity,” where is the appearance
of will exerted by the parties involved? Thus, it is not without reason that Charlotte continues:
“But what am I saying! In reality, what fate is now doing is fulfilling my own desire, my own
intention, which I have been thoughtlessly trying to thwart.” 133 At the same time that she
acknowledges the existence of natural affinity, Charlotte admits her own desire. Fate and free
will are united in the common ground of “elective” affinity.
In rearranging the cemetery, Charlotte endeavors to improve the landscape, but
inadvertently offends the families of the parishioners who are buried there. The difference in
opinion has to do with the relative importance of aesthetics to Eduard and Charlotte, the main
landowners in the township, and to their neighbors. Notably, Charlotte and Eduard, whose
attitudes towards natural and semi-natural spaces tend otherwise to diverge, both see the
alteration as an ‘improvement’ free of consequences. Their shared perspective, which is in
133
Ibid.
64
opposition to the view of the common people in the parish, highlights the contrast between the
role of aesthetics in the upper and lower classes in their society. For nobility such as Eduard and
Charlotte, the aesthetics of the landscape garden (which includes the cemetery and church) is of
great significance; for the villagers, it is not. Eduard sees the work that Charlotte has done as
beneficial; the narrator relates Eduard’s approval of her alterations when he notes that she “had
provided for the demands of sensibility. With every consideration for the ancient monuments she
had managed to level and arrange everything in such a way as to create a pleasant place which
was nice to look at and which set the imagination working.” 134 Charlotte’s “sensibility” is
something that Eduard can appreciate, particularly as this comes right at the beginning of the
novel, before Eduard has become impassioned by his love for Ottilie. The cemetery, post‘improvement,’ is an aesthetically-pleasing, “pleasant place.” Furthermore, the narrator’s choice
of the phrase “set the imagination working” reinforces the connection of the cemetery alteration
with the improvement typical of the landscape gardening style that originated in England. Recall
that Gilpin’s Dialogue referred to the importance of combining nature and art so as to incite the
viewer’s “fancy,” or imagination, in the landscape garden. According to the narrator, Charlotte
has accomplished this task with her alterations to the cemetery.
The local parishioners, however, do not consider the cemetery a place in which to inspire
the imagination. For the villagers, the aesthetics of the landscape is far less relevant than
knowing the exact places where their loved ones are buried. The narrator remarks:
. . . there were some parishioners who had already expressed disapproval that the
place where their ancestors reposed was no longer marked, and that their memory
had thus been so to speak obliterated. There were many who said that, although
the gravestones which were preserved showed who was buried there, they did not
show where they were buried, and it was where they were buried that really
mattered. 135
134
135
Ibid., 32.
Ibid., 156.
65
Place, as opposed to aesthetic quality, is more important to the parishioners who take issue with
Charlotte’s choice to move the monuments. Without knowing where they are buried, the
villagers perceive that the memory of their loved ones has been “obliterated,” even though the
monuments still record who is buried in the cemetery. By marking the particular spot of earth in
which a departed family member rests, the gravestones hold a social meaning beyond the record
of the person’s name and dates of birth and death. While Charlotte is knowledgeable enough in
landscape gardening aesthetics to ‘improve’ the cemetery visually, she is divorced from this
social meaning of place in the landscape. This lapse in her typical good judgment of social
values is perplexing. Eduard had referred to her alterations as providing for “the demands of
sensibility,” yet to the villagers, her action was acutely non-sensical in relation to sacredness of
place. In contrast with the opposition between nature and social mores that I have highlighted,
this social faux pas is an example of one set of social values clashing with another.
*
*
*
Austen’s Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, as novels of manners, are literary spaces
that make social interactions visible. Their landscape gardens – the eponymous estates, as well as
Sotherton and Woodston – provide settings for the character dynamics and faux pas that Austen
explores through her work. As symbols, these estate gardens become focal points for the
contrasts between behaviors genteel and unrefined, proper and scandalous.
Elective Affinities incorporates the landscape garden as a setting as well, but the garden
transcends the status of setting and symbol to become the tangible evidence of the workings of
divine fate, allied with Nature. The garden makes visible the contestation between the social law
of marriage and the irrefutable, allied forces of inner nature and fate. The events that Nature
brings into being in the landscape garden suggest that when fate and inner nature are “obstinately
66
determined upon” an outcome, the social institution of marriage must ultimately yield to its
plans. The landscape of Elective Affinities functions as a naturalistic, yet artistic and artificial
canvas that brings to view characters’ inner tumult as they are confronted with the antagonistic
impulses of their inner natures and the moral codes of society.
In the art of landscape painting, the artist’s canvas is the space within which she unites
nature and art. Informed by the physical realities of the world she paints, yet engaging in a
creative endeavor in that space that is entirely her domain, the artist is like the chemist. Working
within the confines of the predetermined qualities of the substances he brings together, the
chemist is, nevertheless, the primary actor who enables the rearranging of atoms. Working within
the limits of the colors on her palette, the brushes she uses, the quality of her paints, and the
features of the landscape she depicts, the artist transforms the canvas from a blank space to a
simultaneously representational and creative space. She joins the natural features of the
landscape with her own artistic sensibility. Nature typically features prominently in a landscape
painting; art enters the scene through the artist’s unique representation of the view. Depending
upon the artist’s perception of the nature and art present in a landscape, aspects of the landscape
that have been artistically and/or artificially altered may appear in the painting as well.
In the landscapes of the English country estates, landscape gardeners accomplished a
similar feat to painters: the alteration of the natural landscape to include both nature and art.
Gardeners such as Repton entered on the scene of an estate with a particular pre-existing set of
natural features – the “genius of the place” – and, through the art of landscape gardening, applied
aesthetic concepts to the landscape. These aesthetic concepts were an important part of the fabric
of the societies in both England and Germany. Austen and Goethe, through their novels, also
67
created works of nature and art: they represented the ‘natural’ interactions in their society
through their particular artistic sensibilities.
In Austen’s Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey and Goethe’s Elective Affinities,
landscape gardens function as more than mere setting. They are spaces in which character
dynamics and social tensions are made manifest. The novel, like a landscape painting, a
photograph, or a garden itself, is a work of art. As such, it combines nature and art to create a
compelling narrative – ‘nature’ being the landscape gardens themselves, but also the social
dynamics and human tendencies, actions, and emotions that the author perceives actually
existing in the world, and ‘art’ being the author’s own alteration and embellishment of those
‘natural’ elements. Like the landscape gardeners working in eighteenth-century England, the
author unveils and ‘improves’ the subtleties of one particular kind of nature: human nature. The
novel is a mirror in which we can see our own human nature reflected; hence, G. K. Chesterton’s
observation that “the novel is more true than” even books based on empiricism. And like the
landscape gardener, in order to produce a compelling and sophisticated novel, she must find a
balance of nature and art that sufficiently ‘imitates’ nature, so as to create verisimilitude, yet also
uses enough artistry to craft a story that will be recognized as a literary work of art.
68
Chapter III
Framing the Canvas of the National Park
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking 136
In the first section of this thesis I researched the English landscape garden as a ‘canvas’
for aesthetic concepts acquired from landscape painting. Following this historical study, I
analyzed the use of the landscape garden as a canvas in three novels, focusing on specific
references to landscape aesthetics in these texts and identifying the English landscape garden as a
visible expression of character dynamics. Now I’d like to explore another manifestation of
‘landscape as canvas’: the framing of America’s national parks as aesthetic objects to be viewed
similarly to the way the English tradition conceptualized the landscape in gardens and paintings.
Each of the national parks contains its own unique landscapes and frames. As distinct as
they are in their aesthetic features, terrain, climate, biota, human history, and framings of these
aspects, all of the national parks share a common ancestor in the iconic Yosemite Valley. 137 In
this chapter, I will focus on the aesthetic roots that made the Yosemite Valley into an icon and
left a legacy on the valuation of the national parks as aesthetically important spaces. In
particular, I will demonstrate the English landscape garden origins of this valuation. The taste for
136
Solnit, Wanderlust, 68.
“Yosemite,” originally hyphenated as “Yo-Semite,” means “those who kill” in the language of the Miwok tribes
living just outside the Valley, who were traditional enemies of the Paiutes, one of the multiple tribes from which the
Yosemite tribe had formed. L.H. Bunnell, who traveled to Yosemite with the Mariposa Battalion in 1851, chose to
use the tribe’s name for the Valley, “in honor of the tribe they were about to capture and drive out of their home.”
Daniel E. Anderson, “Origin of the Word Yosemite,” Yosemite Library, July 2011,
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/origin_of_word_yosemite.html.
137
69
nature that developed with the English garden influenced the way Americans throughout the past
century have conceived of ‘natural’ landscapes.
America’s national parks, much like the landscape gardens of English estates, were
originally conceived of as places for recreation and the appreciation of the aesthetic beauty found
in nature. 138 The 1,169 square miles that now comprise Yosemite National Park were once only
seven and one. 139 In 1864, Congress passed an Act granting the Yosemite Valley and the
Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the State of California. The seven-square-mile valley and onesquare-mile grove would be incorporated into Yosemite National Park twenty-six years later, in
1890. The Act granting the original eight square miles to California read, “the premises shall be
used for public use, resort, and recreation.” Advocates for the aesthetic and recreational value of
the national parks included John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, but also Frederick Law Olmsted,
a landscape architect better known for designing numerous urban parks, including New York’s
Central Park. In the nature/culture dichotomy that has long been internalized in Western society,
urban spaces, even semi-natural spaces such as parks, are rarely associated with the apparently
wild national parks. Nevertheless, Olmsted’s “Report on the Management of Yosemite” 140 was
essentially an evaluation of Yosemite, at the time not yet protected from consumptive uses, 141
which used the aesthetic concepts landscape architects had been applying to gardens since the
time of Capability Brown.
138
Dilsaver, “Yosemite Act, 1864.”
U.S. National Park Service, “Park Statistics - Yosemite National Park,” National Park Service, accessed March
12, 2014, http://www.nps.gov/yose/parkmgmt/statistics.htm; hikespeak, “Hikes in Yosemite National Park,”
accessed March 12, 2014, http://www.hikespeak.com/sierras/yosemite/; “Mariposa Grove,” Yosemite Experience,
accessed March 12, 2014, http://www.yosemiteexperience.com/yosemite/mariposa-grove/.
140
Frederick Law Olmsted, “Olmsted Report on Management of Yosemite, 1865,” accessed February 15, 2014,
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_1b.htm.
141
Lary M. Dilsaver, “The Early Years: 1864-1918,” America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents,
accessed March 11, 2014, http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_1.htm.
139
70
The association of public lands with the more obviously landscaped private estates and
urban parks is also present in the wording of the 1872 Act of Congress that established
Yellowstone as the world’s first true national park, “a public park or pleasuring-ground for the
benefit and enjoyment of the people.” 142 Congress’ use of the phrase “pleasuring-ground”
hearkens back to the English landscape garden origins of the art of framing landscapes practiced
by American park architects such as Olmsted. The phrase conveys the value of Yellowstone as a
place to enjoy and take pleasure in – as a setting or backdrop for enjoyable experiences, and also
as an aesthetic object. The original choice of the rather tame word “pleasuring” as opposed to
something like “adventuring” is significant. As the world’s first national park, Yellowstone was
meant to function somewhat similarly to the way the gardens of English estates functioned: as
spaces that provided a place to comfortably experience nature.
Leaping the fence from private to public park did not require leaving behind the aesthetic
principles developed by Brown and Repton. In fact, aesthetic concepts such as the picturesque,
the sublime, and the beautiful were readily applied to the national park landscapes by Olmsted
and others. 143 Moreover, when Olmsted designed New York’s Central Park in 1858, English
landscape gardens and the writings of Humphry Repton served as important sources for the
aesthetic theories he applied to the park’s plan. The applicability of aesthetic terms to national
parks, however, did not mean that the national parks were merely three-dimensional paintings,
easily replicable on a canvas. Despite the longstanding tradition of using the language of
landscape painters to describe a landscape garden, there were important differences between the
landscape itself and its portrayal in a painting. Olmsted conveys this divergence when he
142
“Our Documents - Act Establishing Yellowstone National Park (1872),” Ourdocuments.gov, accessed March 11,
2014, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=45&page=transcript.
143
Olmsted, “Olmsted Report on Management of Yosemite, 1865.”
71
articulates the fundamental impossibility of encapsulating the landscape of Yosemite on the
bounded, two-dimensional space of a painting or photograph:
The union of the deepest sublimity with the deepest beauty of nature, not in one
feature or another, not in one part or one scene or another, not in any landscape
that can be framed by itself, but all around and wherever the visitor goes,
constitutes the Yo Semite the greatest glory of nature. No photograph or series of
photographs, no paintings ever prepare a visitor so that he is not taken by surprise,
for could the scenes be faithfully represented the visitor is affected not only by
that upon which his eye is at any moment fixed, but by all that with which on
every side it is associated, and of which it is seen only as an inherent part. 144
With this passage, Olmsted suggests that the unique quality of landscape architecture as a way to
frame a viewshed – “the natural environment that is visible from one or more viewing points” 145
– is that it provides an experience of the landscape in its entirety. This cannot be accomplished
with visual representations such as a painting, a photograph, or even a “series of photographs.”
Note that Olmsted’s assertion that Yosemite cannot fully be captured in paintings and
photographs does not contravene the notion that landscape -- in particular, the landscapes of the
national parks – can be ‘framed’ and understood in the aesthetic language of landscape painting.
Olmsted’s frequent use of terms such as “picturesque,” “beautiful,” “sublime” illustrates this
relevance of the language of landscape painting to the national parks. That language can still be
imposed upon the landscape and used to understand it. The landscape itself, however, as a space
that can be moved through and experienced through all five senses, is fundamentally different
from the static aesthetic of a photograph or painting.
Olmsted’s claim that the landscape cannot be represented by a two-dimensional image is
strikingly similar to Repton’s discussion of landscape painting and gardening. Recall that Repton
himself coined the term “landscape gardening” to convey the close relationship with landscape
144
Ibid.
“Definition of ‘Viewshed,’” Merriam-Webster, accessed April 30, 2014, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/viewshed.
145
72
painting to which his profession was indebted. In Chapter 1 I discussed Repton’s reluctance to
entirely analogize landscape gardening with painting, which had primarily to do with the fact
that an English landscape garden, unlike a canvas, can be experienced in motion, and that the
former is not bounded by a physical frame. In the passage above, Olmsted’s emphasis on
experiencing Yosemite in its entirety, without parceling it out into particular points of the
picturesque, the sublime, or the beautiful, echoes Repton’s writings. Olmsted and Repton were
separated by a century and the Atlantic, yet their ideas about landscape gardening’s parallels and
points of departure with landscape painting converged.
Artistic Representations of Yosemite Valley
The paradox of preserving Yosemite Valley under Olmsted’s justifications is that in
recognizing it as a place of great scenic and aesthetic value, we naturally want to reproduce its
vistas through artistic forms, especially photography and painting. These artistic representations
of the landscape have contributed significantly to the particular ‘framing’ of the national parks
since their conception. Representations of Yosemite Valley on film and canvas are particularly
illustrative of the framing I describe.
From the first days of tourism in Yosemite Valley, visitors described the grand views of
the valley in the aesthetic terms that had originated in England in the 18th century: “beautiful,”
“picturesque,” and “sublime.” Appraising Carleton Watkins’ photographs of Yosemite Valley, a
review published in The Post read:
The views of lofty mountains, of gigantic trees, of falls of water which seem to
descend from heights in the heavens and break into mists before reaching the
73
ground, are indescribably unique and beautiful. Nothing in the way of landscape
can be more impressive or picturesque. 146
I will tread carefully in my interpretation of the reviewer’s use of the term “beautiful” here, for
the word is commonly used in so many contexts and ways that it is rather like that pesky word,
‘nature,’ in its ambiguity of meaning. But the reviewer’s choice of the word “picturesque” is
unmistakable in its reference to the original English definition of the term, because it is preceded
by a description that fits Gilpin’s definition of “picturesque” remarkably well. The scene is
picturesque because of its impressiveness – it features falls that “descend from heights in the
heavens” – and also because of its obscurity; these falls “break into mists before reaching the
ground,” suggesting the mysteriousness characteristic of the original English definition of the
picturesque.
The aesthetic concept of the sublime also featured prominently in artistic representations
of Yosemite and other ‘natural’ landscapes of the American West. English reviewers wrote of
Albert Bierstadt’s Storm in the Rocky Mountains (Figure 4), “no picture that we have ever seen
has more entirely conveyed a sense of natural sublimity,” 147 a strong statement considering that
the sublime had already been a subject of artwork for two hundred years, since the paintings of
Salvator Rosa. In the same breath, the reviewers recognized that this painting was clearly a work
of art, not a literal representation of the scene, and applauded Bierstadt for accomplishing this
artifice. In fact, in order to properly portray sublimity, employing the ‘art’ of imitating nature
was essential. This non-literal reproduction of the landscape was the same ‘imitation’ that the
English landscape gardeners used in their practice, when they sought to emulate the best qualities
of, rather than strictly copy, nature. Just as English gardeners had emphasized the imitation of
146
My emphasis. As quoted in Nancy K. Anderson, Brooklyn Museum, and National Gallery of Art (U.S.), Albert
Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise, 1st ed. (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Brooklyn Museum,
1990), 79.
147
My emphasis. Ibid., 92.
74
nature in the art of landscape gardening, artists depicting the landscapes of the American West
highlighted those features that would produce the most “powerful impression of overwhelming
natural grandeur.” 148 This artistic augmentation of the natural sublime, according to Bierstadt’s
reviewers, was the primary object of the landscape painting of Bierstadt and his contemporaries.
Figure 4: Albert Bierstadt, Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie 149
In the rather special case of Yosemite Valley, however, there was little need for artificial
enhancement. “In Yosemite Valley . . . [Bierstadt] found a landscape so spectacular, so unique in
its grandeur, that he was able to offer what had been desired but not realistically expected: a
national landscape for which there was no equivalent.” 150 In its natural state, Yosemite Valley fit
the specifications of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque remarkably well and provided artists
like Bierstadt with a nearly canvas-ready view of the landscape. More significantly, as a
“national landscape,” Yosemite was to be cherished as a source of American pride and identity.
148
Ibid.
Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, Oil on canvas, 1866, Brooklyn Museum,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Albert_Bierstadt__A_Storm_in_the_Rocky_Mountains,_Mt._Rosalie_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg.
150
My emphasis. Anderson, Brooklyn Museum, and National Gallery of Art (U.S.), Albert Bierstadt, 85.
149
75
As such, Yosemite and other scenic natural places in the West became aesthetic focal points of
the idea of progress put forth by manifest destiny. Yosemite’s natural origins enabled visitors to
view the valley’s aesthetic beauty as divinely created. Upon first seeing the Yosemite Valley in
1863, Fitz Hugh Ludlow (who was traveling with Bierstadt) marveled, “never were words so
beggared for an abridged translation of any Scripture of Nature.” As a landscape within the
territory of the United States that visitors associated with divine Creation, Yosemite and similar
places were used as justification for Western expansion, and the aesthetic value of places like
Yosemite became inseparable from national identity.
Works of art that celebrated such places reinforced the goal of manifest destiny by
creating an idealized, paradisiacal image of the landscape. Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite
Valley (Figure 5), in addition to other paintings he produced of Yosemite, accomplishes this
glorification of the American West. Soft, warm, golden light (a hallmark of Bierstadt’s work)
suffuses the valley and obscures the features in the distance, suggesting that this landscape
remains to be fully explored and charted. In addition to inviting exploration, the landscape
appears to be a pleasant, tranquil place: in the mid-ground, a glassy lake reflects the rich foliage
of the trees in the valley. The looming granite walls of the valley convey the iconic grandeur and
sublimity of the Yosemite Valley.
Artists who strove to capture Yosemite’s majesty on film and canvas were aware of the
impossibility of fully capturing Yosemite through their work. Photographer Ansel Adams
produced the most iconic images of Yosemite, yet understood that not even superb photography
could substitute for the in-person aesthetic experience of the national park. Many of Adams’
photographs convey the sublime grandeur of Yosemite’s massive, glacially-carved valley and
76
soaring, granite cliffs. Adams’ Clearing Winter Storm (Figure 6) depicts the Yosemite Valley as
a sublime landscape, shrouded somewhat in mystery by fog that obscures much of the
Figure 5: Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley 151
background. The photograph, a classic landscape image, takes a broad view of the landscape and
captures the impressive length of the Yosemite Valley, keeping the entire view in focus with a
large photographic depth-of-field. The foreground is set by conifers, the mid-ground by El
Capitan on the left (peeking out of the mist) and by Bridal Veil Falls on the right. In the
distanced background, more granitic features are barely visible through the mist. In Moon and
Half Dome (Figure 7), most of the space within the photo frame is taken up by the figure of Half
Dome and a silhouetted granite feature in the foreground, creating an impression of the vastness
of the rock. The large shadow encroaching onto the face of Half Dome heightens the sense of
enormity and sublimity.
151
Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, Oil on canvas, 1865, Birmingham Museum of Art,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Looking_Down_Yosemite-Valley.jpg.
77
Figure 6: Ansel Adams, Clearing Winter Storm 152
Despite his enduring status as the most revered photographer of Yosemite, Adams knew
that his photographs “could not convey the full experience of Yosemite.” 153 Viewing a
photograph taken in Yosemite could not compare with experiencing the national park in person.
Adams had a strong motivation for attempting to convey as much of Yosemite’s aesthetic value
as possible, for he was an activist as well as an artist, and in his introduction of a book
anthologizing Adams’ photography of Yosemite, Michael L. Fischer asserts that he was “the
best-known American environmentalist since John Muir.” 154 Adams “devoted much of his life to
fighting the historic compulsion of the National Park Service and its concessionaires to turn this
magnificent natural resource into a resort.” 155Adams’ photography of Yosemite is iconic, yet
152
Ansel Adams, Clearing Winter Storm, gelatin silver print, 1942,
http://www2.palomar.edu/users/scrouthamel/ams100/ansel-adams-1942-yosemite-valley-clearing-winterstorm.jpg.
153
Ansel Adams, Yosemite, ed. Andrea G. Stillman, 1st ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 9.
154
Ibid., 12.
155
Ibid., 11.
78
because he strongly believed that America would be aesthetically poorer without preserving the
physical landscape as well as photographs of it, he advocated for policies to preserve the national
park as close to its natural state as possible.
Figure 7: Ansel Adams, Moon and Half Dome 156
Not everyone who has visited Yosemite has felt similarly to Adams about the importance
of preserving it in its natural state. In the first years of Yosemite Valley’s existence as a public
space, there were those who wanted to emphasize further the “park-like appearance” of
Yosemite, past its original natural resemblance. The Valley’s caretakers, one visitor suggested,
should “cut away more of the trees and shrubs, and give the Valley a more park-like appearance
– it could be made into a beautiful park.” 157 Such views of Yosemite Valley as a park with the
potential of “improvement,” the same kind of improvement as the English landscape gardens,
156
Ansel Adams, Moon and Half Dome, gelatin silver print, 1960,
http://myphototeacher.com/bc/Photo/PhotoI/Photo%20Observations/Adams/images/ansel-adams-moon-and-halfdome.jpg.
157
Stanford E. Demars, The Tourist in Yosemite, 1855-1985 (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1991),
50.
79
had their clear origin in England. As Stanford E. Demars notes, one visitor’s remark that “the
evidences of civilization do not spoil the valley . . . [they] only add to the picturesqueness” is “a
typically romantic evaluation.” 158 I would add that this is an evaluative stance inherited from the
legacy of the English landscape garden, when the idea of the “picturesque” was being developed
by Gilpin, Repton, and others, at the same time that Romanticism as a cultural, artistic movement
was developing.
What would become the national park, however, departed from its ancestry in one
particularly significant aspect: the parks were open to the general public and were intended to
require little cost to visit. When Yosemite was established as the first federal land set aside for
the public use, Olmsted called attention to the essential democratic nature of this shared
ownership and open access. Olmsted wrote eloquently about the role of public lands as
democratic spaces all citizens can enjoy regardless of their place in society, asserting in the
report on Yosemite, “it is not true that exemption from toil, much leisure, much study, much
wealth, are necessary to the exercise of the esthetic and contemplative faculties.” 159 Olmsted’s
words here convey his conviction of the ability of aesthetic appreciation to transcend class
divisions, a quality that was essential to considering national parks as truly democratic spaces. In
addition, in the report Olmsted specifically contrasted the accessibility of America’s national
parks with the elite park estates of England:
There are in the islands of Great Britain and Ireland more than one thousand
private parks and notable grounds devoted to luxury and recreation. . . . The
enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of
recreation connected with them is thus a monopoly, in a very peculiar manner, of
a very few, very rich people. The great mass of society, including those to whom
it would be of the greatest benefit, is excluded from it. 160
158
Ibid., 51.
Olmsted, “Olmsted Report on Management of Yosemite, 1865.”
160
Ibid.
159
80
In contrast with their private equivalent in England, in which the rich have a “monopoly” on park
spaces, Olmsted intended the “choicest natural scenes” of America to be available to all
citizens. 161 “The great mass of society” must have access to places so beneficial to the health and
wellness of both men and women, as Olmsted expounded in his report. Olmsted saw Yosemite
and other ‘natural’ and semi-natural spaces as redemptive – as building character. In Yosemite,
Olmsted saw the potential for aesthetic appreciation that was barred to no one, for the benefit of
all. As I will discuss further in this section, Olmsted’s envisioning of the parks as democratic
spaces continues to inform the American public’s conception of the national parks.
Current Framings of the National Parks
The national parks continue to be framed today as democratic spaces by the National
Park Service and by public media. From the perspective of the National Park Service, as
“democratic” spaces accessible to all, the national parks must be interpreted so that all visitors
can appreciate what they have to offer. According to a National Park Service publication:
Another term for interpreters could be visitor experience specialists. They provide
orientation, information and inspiration in the right amounts and at the right times
so that visitors will have more enjoyable, meaningful and complete
experiences. 162
161
By contrasting the exclusiveness of English estates and the inclusiveness of American national parks, Olmsted
created somewhat of a false dichotomy. Olmsted disregarded the fact that America, too, had private parks that were
restricted to a very few people in the upper echelons of society. Both Olmsted and his predecessor, Andrew Jackson
Downing, had been commissioned to design landscapes restricted to private ownership and enjoyment. But
Olmsted’s essential message that there must be outdoor spaces open to the public for recreation and aesthetic
enjoyment is not contradicted by the private estates he himself designed. The existence of private estates in America
that had their own exclusive landscape gardens made the project of setting aside national parks as “pleasuringgrounds for the people” all the more vital. If America was to live up to the democratic ideals of a nation in which
“all men are created equal,” it needed parks open to all citizens. The aesthetic principles developed on private estates
by the English landscape gardeners needed to “leap the fence,” to borrow the phrase from Walpole, into the public
domain. Judy Haun, “Olmsted’s Crown Jewel,” Cobblestone, August 2012; “Andrew Jackson Downing,” Columbia
Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, September 2013, 1–1; Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in
Gardening.
162
My emphasis. National Park Service, “Foundations of Interpretation Curriculum Content Narrative,” March 1,
2007, 2, http://www.nps.gov/idp/interp/101/foundationscurriculum.pdf.
81
While the document goes on to expound on the meaning of this definition, it is undeniably
vague. What, exactly, are the “right” amounts of interpretive elements, and when is the “right”
time to unveil them? Furthermore, what constitutes a “meaningful” and “complete” experience?
Who defines these values? The National Park Service provides numerous resources to
interpretive staff (including, for example, the publication from which the above passage came) so
that the agency can direct the interpretation to some degree. Yet interpretation, as the publication
also notes, “is an art.” 163 Each “visitor experience specialist” becomes an artist with some
creative leeway to interpret the landscape as they wish, re-framing the landscape for visitors to
experience.
The interpretive methods employed by the National Park Service also frame the
landscape by encouraging visitors to experience a landscape from particular viewpoints and
paths and at a particular scale. A vista is by definition a broad, panoramic view of a landscape,
yet the designation of a viewpoint marks a landscape as a bounded space. By distinguishing a
view as a vista, the National Park Service divides the landscape as a whole into a single view,
framing the space and sometimes, depending on the popularity of the park and vista, creating an
iconic image. Consider that the same phenomenon occurs whenever a landscape artist or
photographer chooses a particular view as their subject, framing it as a work of art. The grand
Yosemite Valley that became the subject of Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley and
Adams’ Clearing Winter Storm became iconic partly because of their respective choices to paint
and photograph it from those specific viewpoints. Interpretive signs, which are usually
conspicuously placed close to the wall or fence delineating the viewpoint, draw visitors’
attention to particular features in the landscape much as an artistic frame. Like the didactic
163
Ibid., 3.
82
placards introducing an exhibit in a museum, interpretation also provides visitors with the
historical and natural contexts for their experience of the park.
Visitors to the national parks experience landscapes that have been altered from their
original natural state so as to encourage a particular viewing experience. Pathways, trails,
interpretive signs, scenic viewpoints, pamphlets, and books available for purchase in national
parks gift shops all function as interpretive tools the National Park Service employs to ensure
that the public is able to experience numerous facets of the parks. Through interpretation, park
biology, geology, climate, history, anthropology, paleontology, and hydrology are all put into
language and images the National Park Service believes the public can understand. Because of
its inherently democratic nature, interpretation (unsurprisingly) originated in America.
Landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, whose numerous park designs and extensive
writings on landscape theory earned him the title of “The Father of American Parks,” 164 made
significant contributions to interpretation as an art. Downing “introduced the fundamental
concepts of selecting viewpoints, enframing vistas, and moving the visitor through a sequence of
views and scenes along curvilinear paths and steps to ensure pleasure and comfort while
fostering appreciation and sensibility.” 165 Previously to Downing, such interpretive elements as
viewpoints, framed vistas, and directed paths were of minimal importance in the experience of a
landscape. Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the National Park Service has employed these
interpretive features so as to make the national parks accessible to the public.
This democratic park legacy has been highlighted by public media. Ken Burns’
acclaimed documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which aired on PBS in 2009
164
“Andrew Jackson Downing,” American National Biography Online, accessed April 29, 2014,
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00235.html.
165
Linda Flint McClelland, Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 34.
83
with an estimated viewership of 33.4 million, 166 emphasizes the democratic quality of the
national parks. In the film, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club describes the national parks’ special
relevance to democracy:
What could be more democratic than owning together the most magnificent
places on your continent? Think about Europe. In Europe, the most magnificent
places, the palaces, the parks, are owned by aristocrats, by monarchs, by the
wealthy. In America, magnificence is a common treasure. That's the essence of
our democracy. 167
The most striking aspect of Pope’s remarks is that they identify “magnificence” as America’s
most valuable asset. Pope chose “magnificent places” – specifically, the National Parks – as “the
essence of our democracy,” over the many other significant American hallmarks (including
agrarianism, diversity across multiple categorizations, and “the American dream”) that define
our nation. Pope’s statement that the national parks are “the essence of our democracy” is a
strong claim, but not unprecedented. Both his words and, more overtly, the film title itself, echo
the original words of Wallace Stegner, whose 1983 article in Wilderness proclaimed “the
national park idea [is] the best idea we’ve ever had.” 168 The documentary and its promotional
advertising are intended to convey to PBS viewers the inherently “American” nature of the
national parks. On the PBS website, an “About the Series” page describes the film as “the story
of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the
most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for
everyone.” 169 Such a depiction of the central aim of the national parks as democratic spaces –
“for everyone” – echoes Olmsted’s words in his report on Yosemite. Olmsted, too, placed the
166
“Ken Burns’s The National Parks: America’s Best Idea Launched National Conversation About Country’s
Parks,” KPBS, January 13, 2010, http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/news/20100113_nationalparksimpactbaseball.html.
167
Ken Burns, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (PBS, 2009).
168
Wallace Stegner, “The Best Idea We Ever Had: An Overview,” Wilderness 46, no. 160 (1983): 4.
169
“‘The National Parks: America’s Best Idea’ -- About the Series,” PBS, accessed April 17, 2014,
http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/about/.
84
democratic ideal of the national parks in contrast with the exclusivity of other natural spaces,
including the English landscape garden; the national parks were, by definition, “not for royalty or
the rich.” The film itself attempts to democratize the story of the national parks by featuring the
contemporary stories of racially diverse Americans “who continue to be transformed and
inspired by the parks today.” 170 Olmsted’s view of public lands as highly American, democratic
spaces continues to be expressed by filmmakers like Ken Burns and within the public sphere.
This positioning of the democratic nature of the national parks in contrast with the elitism
of estate parks mirrors, of course, American nationalism itself. Just as the English landscape
garden was both born out of, and fed, English nationalism, the American national parks were
originally conceived of as cornerstones of national identity. Our nation’s great experiment of
democracy, starting most notably with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was
predicated on the founding fathers’ determination to do things differently from the monarchic
system that ruled England. As is evidenced by Burns’ film, which was widely aired on public
television networks, the national parks continue to be characterized as constitutive to our nation,
if not “the essence of our democracy,” according to Pope. 171
Burns’ characterization of the national parks is not unproblematic. While his films strive
to make historical subjects accessible to the general public, in many ways they fail to challenge
viewers to consider subjects in a new, more accurate light. In fact, the very aim of making Burns’
films entertaining to the general public is a hindrance to the extent to which they can accomplish
the goal of educating the public:
Although his work has been soundly critiqued by academics for its
endorsement(s) of neoliberal ideology, its interpretive liberties, its avoidance of
intellectual controversies, and its misleading articulations of evidence in the
170
171
Ibid.
My emphasis.
85
service of advancing an entertaining narrative, his interpretations of history
continue to be celebrated by the mainstream media. 172
Burns’ “endorsement(s) of neoliberal ideology” and “avoidance of intellectual controversies” in
particular produce documentaries in which viewers’ existing ideas, which may be inaccurate, go
uncontested. Instead of being asked to consider divergent viewpoints to the ones they are used to
adopting, viewers enjoy “an entertaining narrative.” Considering the congeniality and
undemanding nature of Burns’ storytelling, it’s no wonder that the mainstream media has
“celebrated” Burns’ work.
What is the ultimate effect of such practices as avoiding intellectual controversy and
“advancing an entertaining narrative”? In her discussion of “conservation civics,” which asks the
public to adopt ideas of “environmental public memory” 173 while remaining comfortably
distanced from the challenges of actualizing conservation, Spurlock describes how Burns’ films
seek to provide a reassuring historical identity that Americans can readily latch onto:
As highlighted in National Parks, conservation civics deemphasizes or elides the
role of conflict, presents conservation as commemoration, positions the
relationships between nature and culture as national and free of local complexity
or nuance, and encourages the public to value these particular places as scenic and
abundant natural resources of cultural and environmental inspiration. Discourses
that deploy conservation civics . . . aim to make conservation an acceptable part
of public life by not interrupting, challenging, or contesting the status quo. 174
Conservation civics encourages an ‘easy’ kind of engagement with conservation, centered more
on asking the public to identify as passive conservationists cheering from the sidelines than as an
organized citizenry who works through the exigent challenges to bringing conservation to
fruition. Deceptively disabling, conservation civics threatens democracy by allowing citizens to
172
Cindy Spurlock, “America’s Best Idea: Environmental Public Memory and the Rhetoric of Conservation Civics,”
in Observation Points : The Visual Poetics of National Parks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012),
254.
173
Ibid., 262.
174
Ibid.
86
feel as though they are engaging with and shaping conservation in meaningful ways, when really
they are deferring to those who benefit from the status quo.
So here is the paradox we have reached: The American public prides itself on its national
parks as symbols of democracy, yet the ways in which these democratic places tend to be
discussed – including discourses such as Burns’, which aim to reinforce that connection with
national identity – actually end up subverting the aims of our democratic system. Generally, we
define our democracy as a governmental system that encourages the active engagement of
citizens with issues of national concern, in an effort to continually improve. Our founding fathers
declared “. . . that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of [individuals’
unalienable rights], it is the Right of the People . . . [and] their duty, to throw off such
Government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” 175 I will also remind the reader
that the U.S. Constitution provides the means for keeping public officials accountable, as well as
amending the text itself, so that our government can better protect the “Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness,” as Jefferson first articulated, of the collective American people. These
original documents that laid the foundations of a democratic United States of America posited
that citizens should be able and expected, through civic engagement, to participate in their
democracy. (Though, of course, with some gaping holes in terms of who could participate, which
were subsequently patched by the women’s suffrage movement and the civil rights movement,
among numerous others; some gaps remain and continue to be filled in to this day). The extent to
which our nation has surpassed or fallen short of these original goals is constantly debated in
today’s partisan political sphere, and I will not digress further into this realm. My point here is
that the framing of the national parks – by Burns, the mainstream media that take its cue from his
175
“Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” The Charters of Freedom, accessed April 18, 2014,
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html.
87
presentation of history, and even the National Park Service itself – attempts to reify democracy,
and instead undermines fundamental democratic ideals.
My primary objective in this thesis is to draw connections between modern American
conceptions of ‘nature’ and their roots in the English landscape garden. The framing of the
national parks as constitutive to American national identity mirrors the way in which the English
conceived of their landscape gardens. In Chapter 1, I discussed how the English landscape
garden became a culturally-significant space in which the international power struggle between
England and France was played out. The English nobility undertook the time-consuming and
costly task of ‘improving’ their estates partly in the interest of defining and affirming their
national identity. Significant differences notwithstanding, the English landscape gardens and the
American national parks are essentially artistic undertakings: both constitute projects that use
nature, combined with aesthetic ideals and interpretive framings, to craft national identity.
88
Conclusion
An ‘Original Relation’ with Nature
If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. 176
In this thesis I have first discussed the English relationship with landscape in the
eighteenth century, as the landscape gardening movement developed. To investigate this
relationship through the lens of a cultural product, I then turned to three novels in which the
English landscape garden plays an important role. Austen’s Mansfield Park and Northanger
Abbey and Goethe’s Elective Affinities use landscape gardens to make visible social landscapes
and character dynamics. Finally, I “leapt the fence” of the garden by examining how the
aesthetic ideas that took root in the English landscape garden dispersed to the comparatively
‘wild’ landscapes of the American National Parks.
Both consciously and unconsciously, we shape and frame our social and physical
landscapes, making them into ‘canvases’ onto which we paint nature, human nature, and art. In
landscape gardens we have harnessed nature through art, imposing abstract aesthetic values onto
the estates of nobility and framing these places as ‘natural.’ In novels we have combined nature
and human nature with art, producing texts that we frame as artistic works worthy of extensive
literary analysis. And in the American national parks we have framed landscapes as ‘natural’ and
democratic, at the same time that our very framing introduces the art of interpretation into the
landscape and encourages a conservation civics that undermines our democratic power to protect
these places. By recognizing the ways we frame these landscapes – some of which are
176
Agnieszka Holland, The Secret Garden, Drama, Family, Fantasy, 1993.
89
problematic and perpetuate past harms done to both nature and our fellow humans – we can
critically examine our own perceptions and actions and, I hope, move towards a more original
relation with nature and humankind.
The landscape gardens in the English countryside and Austen and Goethe’s novels, and
the American national parks, function as loci of character development. In eighteenth-century
England, the landed gentry created landscape gardens on their estates as part of a broader
intention of identifying as ‘cultured.’ They both created, and were shaped by, the aesthetic
theories they made manifest in the landscape. As Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and
Elective Affinities illustrate, the landscape garden was intended to be a space for polite, genteel
conversation and etiquette – for entertaining friends and for courting lovers. The ‘action’ in the
three novels – the infractions of manners and social tensions that they reveal – relies on
landscape gardens as spaces that allow these character dynamics to be perceived.
Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, as quintessential novels of manners, use the
landscape garden as a setting for character interactions and as a symbol of different
interpretations of social mores, with the ultimate effect of drawing attention to character
manners. Elective Affinities also relies on the landscape garden as setting, but uses the garden at a
different level as well. Capital-N Nature, allied with divine fate, works through the landscape
garden to bring about the events and outcomes it is “obstinately determined upon.”
The making of the landscape into a ‘canvas,’ above all, reflects ideas of what is ‘natural.’
Landowners’ conceptions of what landscapes appeared ‘natural’ became expressed in the general
style of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden. In Austen’s Northanger Abbey and
Mansfield Park, this notion of ‘natural’ appears in the scenes featuring English landscape
gardens, and in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, ideas of what is ‘natural’ appear both in reference to
90
the landscape and to the affinities of souls. The aesthetic foundations of our national parks
presupposed the ‘naturalness’ of spaces that had already been occupied by humans for thousands
of years. In all of these relationships of humans with what they called ‘natural,’ there was
fabrication; what was seen as ‘natural’ was often more artificial.
Yet despite the denial of artifice, of human influence, in these disparate arenas, there is
also truth in the relationship of these societies with their landscapes. Landscape gardens, novels,
and national parks are an expression of the engagement of humanity with nature, a force
traditionally seen in the Western world as separate from ourselves, with what Ralph Waldo
Emerson calls “NOT ME.” 177 In that engagement, humanity reaches outside of its small and
isolated sphere. Emerson wrote, “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” 178
This “original relation” is something we as a species, despite our confidence in our own
dominance, and because of our shame in that dominance, invariably keep returning to. In
Elective Affinities, the schoolmaster reflects on our interaction with nature as that around us:
“We should know nothing of nature,” he said, “except that of it with which we are
in immediate living contact. With every tree around us which blossoms, bears
leaves and brings forth fruit, with every shrub we pass by, with every blade of
grass upon which we tread, we have a true relationship, they are our genuine
compatriots.” 179
In creating ‘naturalistic’ landscapes, the English landscape gardeners and the founders of the
American national parks sought to be “in immediate living contact” with nature, so as to develop
a “true relationship” with it. Austen and Goethe expressed a yearning for a similar connection
with the nature of the landscape garden and the human nature they made visible through their
177
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Oregon State, 1836,
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html#Chapter%20I.
178
Ibid.
179
Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1971, 215.
91
novels. When we visit the national parks, interpretation asks us to experience nature in particular
ways, some of which are problematic and constrain the relationship of a visitor with the
landscape they experience. My conviction is that a greater consciousness of the ways that we
‘canvas’ and frame landscapes, rather than merely making us self-critical of these tendencies,
can invite us into a more reflective and intentional relationship with nature.
92
Bibliography
Adams, Ansel. Clearing Winter Storm. Gelatin silver print, 1942.
http://www2.palomar.edu/users/scrouthamel/ams100/ansel-adams-1942-yosemite-valleyclearing-winterstorm.jpg.
———. Moon and Half Dome. Gelatin silver print, 1960.
http://myphototeacher.com/bc/Photo/PhotoI/Photo%20Observations/Adams/images/ansel
-adams-moon-and-half-dome.jpg.
———. Yosemite. Edited by Andrea G. Stillman. 1st ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.
Anderson, Daniel E. “Origin of the Word Yosemite.” Yosemite Library, July 2011.
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/origin_of_word_yosemite.html.
Anderson, Nancy K., Brooklyn Museum, and National Gallery of Art (U.S.). Albert Bierstadt:
Art & Enterprise. 1st ed. New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Brooklyn
Museum, 1990.
“Andrew Jackson Downing.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, September 2013,
1–1.
“Andrew Jackson Downing.” American National Biography Online. Accessed April 29, 2014.
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00235.html.
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. 1st ed. A Norton Critical
Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
———. Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon. Edited by John Davie and
James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
93
Bierstadt, Albert. A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie. Oil on canvas, 1866. Brooklyn
Museum. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Albert_Bierstadt__A_Storm_in_the_Rocky_Mountains,_Mt._Rosalie_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg.
———. Looking Down Yosemite Valley. Oil on canvas, 1865. Birmingham Museum of Art.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Looking_Down_YosemiteValley.jpg.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary
Imagination. Blackwell Manifestos. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. A new edition. London, 1793.
http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupN
ame=whitman&tabID=T001&docId=CW3322693546&type=multipage&contentSet=EC
COArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE.
Burns, Ken. The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. PBS, 2009.
Chesterton, G. K. Heretics. New York: John Lane Co., 1905.
Cox, Jeff, and Jerry Pavia. Creating a Garden for the Senses. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993.
“Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” The Charters of Freedom. Accessed April 18,
2014. http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html.
“Definition of ‘Canvass.’” Merriam-Webster. Accessed March 14, 2014. http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/canvass.
“Definition of ‘Romanticism.’” Oxford Dictionaries. Accessed April 19, 2014.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/romanticism.
94
“Definition of ‘Viewshed.’” Merriam-Webster. Accessed April 30, 2014. http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/viewshed.
Demars, Stanford E. The Tourist in Yosemite, 1855-1985. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of
Utah Press, 1991.
Dilsaver, Lary M. “The Early Years: 1864-1918.” America’s National Park System: The Critical
Documents. Accessed March 11, 2014.
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_1.htm.
———. “Yosemite Act, 1864.” America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents.
Accessed March 11, 2014.
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_1a.htm.
Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels. Johns
Hopkins paperbacks ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Oregon State, 1836.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emersona.html#Chapter%20I.
Gibbon, Michael. “Stowe, Buckinghamshire: The House and Garden Buildings and Their
Designers.” Architectural History 20 (January 1, 1977): 31–83. doi:10.2307/1568349.
Gilpin, William. A Dialogue Upon the Gardens of the Right Honorable Lord Viscount Cobham
at Stow in Buckinghamshire. Reprint edition. Augustan Reprint Society, Publication No.
176. Los Angeles: University of California, 1976.
———. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching
Landscape: To Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting. By William Gilpin, M.
A. Prebendary of Salisbury; and Vicar of Boldre in New Forest, Near Lymington.
95
London, 1792.
http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupN
ame=whitman&tabID=T001&docId=CW3306433519&type=multipage&contentSet=EC
COArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE.
Glass, Derek, Dr Matthew Bell, and Martin H. Jones. Goethe in English: A Bibliography of the
Translations in the Twentieth Century. MHRA, 2005.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin
Classics, L242. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
———. Elective Affinities : A Novel. New York : Collier, 1966.
http://archive.org/details/electiveaffiniti00goetuoft.
———. “The Sorrows of Young Werther, by J. W. von Goethe.” EBook. Translated by R. D.
Boylan. Project Gutenberg, 2009. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2527/2527-h/2527h.htm.
Haun, Judy. “Olmsted’s Crown Jewel.” Cobblestone, August 2012.
hikespeak. “Hikes in Yosemite National Park.” Accessed March 12, 2014.
http://www.hikespeak.com/sierras/yosemite/.
Holland, Agnieszka. The Secret Garden. Drama, Family, Fantasy, 1993.
Hunt, John Dixon. A World of Gardens. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.
———. “Introduction.” In A Dialogue Upon the Gardens at Stow. Los Angeles, 1976.
———. “Picturesque Mirrors and the Ruins of the Past.” Art History 4, no. 3 (September 1981):
254–70.
Johnson, Claudia L. “Introduction.” In Mansfield Park. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.,
1998.
96
“Ken Burns’s The National Parks: America’s Best Idea Launched National Conversation About
Country’s Parks.” KPBS, January 13, 2010.
http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/news/20100113_nationalparksimpactbaseball.html.
Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton, N.J:
Princeton University Press, 1971.
Leatherbarrow, David. “Creative Movement in Shaftesbury and Early Romanticism.” Umeni /
Art 56, no. 6 (December 2008): 504–13.
Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., Inc., 1967.
Leone, Ann. “The Reptonian Turn: Reassessing Landscape Design in Goethe’s Elective
Affinities.” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 31, no. 1 (2011):
26–39. doi:10.1080/14601171003683722.
Lorch, Benjamin. “Definition of ‘Landscape.’” The University of Chicago: Keywords Glossary,
2002. http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/landscape.htm.
Lorrain, Claude. Pastoral Landscape. Oil on canvas, 1647. Timken Museum.
http://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/collection-item-image/71.
Loukaki, Argyro. “Whose Genius Loci?: Contrasting Interpretations of the ‘Sacred Rock of the
Athenian Acropolis.’” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, no. 2
(June 1997): 306–29. doi:10.2307/2564372.
“Mariposa Grove.” Yosemite Experience. Accessed March 12, 2014.
http://www.yosemiteexperience.com/yosemite/mariposa-grove/.
McClelland, Linda Flint. Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and
Construction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
97
National Park Service. “Foundations of Interpretation Curriculum Content Narrative,” March 1,
2007. http://www.nps.gov/idp/interp/101/foundationscurriculum.pdf.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. “Olmsted Report on Management of Yosemite, 1865.” Accessed
February 15, 2014. http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_1b.htm.
“Our Documents - Act Establishing Yellowstone National Park (1872).” Ourdocuments.gov.
Accessed March 11, 2014.
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=45&page=transcript.
Overton, Mark. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian
Economy, 1500-1850. Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 23. Cambridge ; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Pope, Alexander. “Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV.” The Poetry Foundation. Accessed
February 9, 2014. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174160.
Poussin, Nicolas. Landscape with a Calm. Oil on canvas, 1651. Getty Museum.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Nicolas_Poussin_%28French__Landscape_with_a_Calm_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg.
Repton, Humphry. Ferney Hall Red Book, n.d.
http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/repton/redbook.asp?id=FerneyHall.
Repton, Humphry, and John Nolen. The Art of Landscape Gardening: Including His Sketches
and Hints on Landscape Gardening and Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening.
Houghton, Mifflin, 1907.
Rosa, Salvator. Rocky Landscape with a Huntsman and Warriors. Oil on canvas, c 1670. Louvre
Museum. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Salvator_Rosa__Rocky_Landscape_with_a_Huntsman_and_Warriors_-_WGA20063.jpg.
98
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Penguin, 2001.
Soper, Kate. What Is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1998.
Spence, Joseph, and Edmond Malone. Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and
Men: Collected from Conversation. Murray, 1820.
Spurlock, Cindy. “America’s Best Idea: Environmental Public Memory and the Rhetoric of
Conservation Civics.” In Observation Points : The Visual Poetics of National Parks, 247
– 266. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Steenbergen, Clemens M. Architecture and Landscape: The Design Experiment of the Great
European Gardens and Landscapes. New York: Prestel, 1996.
Stegner, Wallace. “The Best Idea We Ever Had: An Overview.” Wilderness 46, no. 160 (1983):
4–13.
“‘The National Parks: America’s Best Idea’ -- About the Series.” PBS. Accessed April 17, 2014.
http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/about/.
Turner, Roger. Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English Landscape. New York:
Rizzoli, 1985.
U.S. National Park Service. “Park Statistics - Yosemite National Park.” National Park Service.
Accessed March 12, 2014. http://www.nps.gov/yose/parkmgmt/statistics.htm.
Walpole, Horace. The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening. New York: Ursus Press, 1995.
Weltman-Aron, Brigitte. On Other Grounds: Landscape Gardening and Nationalism in
Eighteenth-Century England and France. SUNY Series, the Margins of Literature.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.
99
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press,
1985.
100